CFL’s - “Zip drives” for lighting?
A couple days ago, I had my first CFL burn out.
I plan to switch to LED lighting once we run through our suppy of CFL’s (I got a bit overeager, so we’ve got two spare CFL’s to go through before we buy new lights). While there are still a few hurdles price-wise*, I think LED lighting will start penetrating the consumer lighting market in the next decade.
According to this Washington Post article last year, CFL’s had 80% of the Japanese residential market, 50% in Germany, 20% in the UK… and 6% of the US market. With energy prices continually going up, and solid-state (LED) lighting representing longer-life So I think LED’s could reach 10% of the market. Especially given their advantages over CFL’s:
- longer expected life: 50-60,000 hours vs. 10-20,000 hours
- up to 50x as efficient as incandescents (CFL’s are up to 5x as efficient)
- the fact they’re “dimmable”
Sources for the above: here, here, here.
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This got me wondering whether CFL’s are doomed to be the Zip drives of the lighting market. Though they represented a quantum improvement over 3.5″ floppies, Zip drives were soon displaced by CD’s, which could store more data, cheaper.
Similarly, though CFL’s represent a huge improvement over incandescent light bulbs — which should really be called ‘heat bulbs’ because they produce 90% heat and 10% light — I think they themselves will be displaced by solid-state / LED lighting, in relatively short order.
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* hat-tip to Brian Piccioni’s “The Geek’s Weekly Reading List”