LED lights are being applied all throughout homes and businesses alike. Take a close look inside the LED. You may be surprised at how amazing LEDs can be.

The LED (light-emitting diode) is essentially a semiconductor light source incased in a clear plastic package. LED’s produce light when electrons inside the diode, excited by the flow of current, release energy in the form of light photons. LED lighting is ultra-compact and dramatically more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs – up to 85% more efficient – and over 10% more efficient than compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL’s). Just imagine, you could install an LED bulb in your newborn’s room today, and probably not have to replace that bulb until your child is off to college. And, because LED bulbs are based on solid-state lighting technology that emits light from a chip, they produce minimal heat and there is no filament to burn out, as with incandescent bulbs. Nor do they contain mercury and other toxic material.

Next time you are replacing your burnt out bulb consider switching to LED lighting, The LED lighting may cost you more, but over time LEDs payback themselves. Choose the proper LED Lighting product, go with ITALUCE.

By Bruce Leed

Dropped ceiling with LED lamps

General purpose lighting needs white light. LEDs emit light in a very small band of wavelengths, emitting strongly colored light. The color is characteristic of the energy bandgap of the semiconductor material used to make the LED. To emit white light from LEDs requires either mixing light from red, green, and blue LEDs, or using a phosphor to convert some of the light to other colors.

The first method (RGB-LEDs) uses multiple LED chips each emitting a different wavelength in close proximity, to form the broad white light spectrum. The advantage of this method is that the intensity of each LED can be adjusted to “tune” the character of the light emitted. The major disadvantage is high production cost.

The second method, phosphor converted LEDs (pcLEDs) uses one short wavelength LED (usually blue or ultraviolet) in combination with a phosphor, which absorbs a portion of the blue light and emits a broader spectrum of white light. (The mechanism is similar to the way a fluorescent lamp emits white light from a UV-illuminated phosphor.) The major advantage here is the low production cost, and high CRI (color rendering index), while the disadvantage is the inability to dynamically change the character of the light and the fact that phosphor conversion reduces the efficiency of the device. The low cost and adequate performance makes it the most widely used technology for general lighting today.

A single LED is a low-voltage solid state device and cannot be directly operated on standard AC current without some circuitry to control the voltage applied and the current flow through the lamp. A series diode and resistor could be used to control the voltage polarity and to limit the current, but this is inefficient since most of the applied voltage would be dropped as wasted heat in the resistor. A single series string of LEDs would minimize dropped-voltage losses, but one LED failure could extinguish the whole string. Paralleled strings increase reliability by providing redundancy. In practice, three strings or more are usually used. To be useful for illumination for home or work spaces, a number of LEDs must be placed close together in a lamp to combine their illuminating effects. This is because individual LEDs emit only a fraction of the light of traditional light sources. When using the color-mixing method, a uniform color distribution can be difficult to achieve, while the arrangement of white LEDs is not critical for color balance. Further, degradation of different LEDs at various times in a color-mixed lamp can lead to an uneven color output. LED lamps usually consist of clusters of LEDs in a housing with both driver electronics, a heat sink and optics.