Importance of LED lighting devices.
LED lighting is produced by a diode, which is a semiconductor. LED (light emitting diodes) lighting devices are used in many industries these days. These LED devices are found in many products such as computer components, VCR, DVD, gaming devices, mobile phones, digital cameras, musical instruments etc.
While miniature LED’s are used in small-scale industries, larger LED’s can be used as an important source of illumination. LED’s have already replaced the incandescent and fluorescent light sources in many industries. These LED devices are used for emergency, police vehicle lighting, emergency lighting, etc.
What makes these LED devices superior to others is their energy efficiency, long life span, durability, wide range of colors, low-voltage power supply and easier to maintain.
These qualities make the LED lighting devices in high demand for industrial, private and household purposes.
LED bulbs, tubes and pods and various other LED devices have found place in industries today because of its multitude of vivid and bright colors. Not only that, by combining different colored LED devices one can produce amazing color changing effects by activation of different layers of LED lighting devices. Some LED’s can even produce more than 16 million colors, including white light.
The key strength of LED lighting is reduced power consumption. When designed properly, a LED circuit achieves 80% efficiency, which means 80% of electrical energy is converted to light. Only 20% is lost as heat energy. Comparing them with incandescent bulbs, which operates at 20% efficiency implying that 80% of total energy consumed is converted to heat. In architectural applications, the greatest penetrations of LED have been in exit signs, both new signs and retrofits. LED retrofit products which come in various forms include light bars, panels and screw in LED lamps, drawing an average 2-5 W of energy per sign, results in significant savings compared to incandescent lamps. The consumption of single LED is 0.03 to 0.06 watt while the voltage drawn is 1.5-3.5 Volts. This power consumption of LED is one-eight of incandescent bulbs and half of fluorescent bulbs, as per a recent study.
The next advantage of LED lighting is their long service life. The operational life of current white lights is 100,000 hours. This is actually 11 years of continuous operation or 50% of 22 years of operation, which is indeed quite amazing. The average life of LED lights is in sharp contrast to those of incandescent lights whose average operational life is just about 5000 hours. For this reason LED’s are ideal for hard-to-reach/ maintain features such as exit sign lighting and, combined with its durability, pathway lighting. This service however can be affected by application and environmental factors, including heat.
There is also no comparison between the cost of these lights and traditional incandescent lights. With incandescent bulbs, their actual cost lies in the cost of bulbs, labor expense, and time needed to replace them. These factors matter hugely especially when the number of installed bulbs is large. These issues on the other hand can be virtually removed in case of lightings.
This source also generates low heat, no thermal radiation and can be touched safely. Besides, LED lightings can control light pattern and light angle. Also LED ‘s produce no ultraviolet radiations, making them ideal for illuminating objects, such as work of art, which are sensitive to UV light.
LED’s are also highly rugged. They have no filament that can get destroyed due to shock and vibrations.
A single LED is very small and produces overall a lesser amount of light. This feature actually adds to its advantage since LED’s can be combined into any shape to produce desired lumen packages.
The main limitation LED lighting is the high cost of LED bulbs. Although the costs keep going down, the price of LED bulbs is still expensive. Nevertheless, the LED lights are cheaper to maintain and its best value comes from the commercial use where maintenance and replacement costs are expensive.