Re: Anyone moved to LED Lighting?

["Robert Green" <robert_green1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Jeff Volp" <JeffVolp@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:HxCHm.141327$8m4.28654@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Except for the "intricately curved delicate glass tubes", 120V LEDs have
> essentially the same production and noise issues as CFLs.

That's a pretty big exception. As a guy who custom builds electronics by
hand, I am sure that you realize that even one delicate step in a process,
say soldering an SMD component to a circuit board by hand, can cause your
reject rate to soar. Take a look at some of the spiral shapes of bulbs and I
think you'll realize that it takes some significant heat and tooling to
create narrow but even diameter glass tubes that then must be twisted into
spiral shape, uniformly coated internally with phosphor, primed with
mercury, and then sealed and capped with electrodes.   Forgive me for taking
a technical note and turning it into polemic, but this is an important
issue.

Even if LED and CFL production costs were equal, manufacturing CFL's means
increasing the mining for mercury and causing much more of the neurotoxin to
enter the world at large. It may very well turn out that  CFLs looked good
on paper but turned out not to be so good when all costs are computed, just
like biofuels.

While one dot of mercury might not seem so bad, almost 300 million CFL's
were sold in the United States last year (or so says the New York Times in a
Feb. 17, 2008, editorial). But what worries me is the even more staggering
figure that CFL's are currently used in only 10% to 20% of the fixtures in
residential home. That could extrapolate into perhaps 3 *billion* CFL's
getting deployed after the mandate's phased in. Even when you talk about
micrograms per bulbs, that's a lot of mercury going into landfills,
incinerators and eventually, the bloodstream of newborn babies.

> That Lumform 4W MR16 LED gets too hot to touch, and is a very strong
> radiator of 121KHz powerline noise.

Both technologies have shortcomings, agreed, but fluorescent technology has
been around for a much longer time than LEDs and if such CFL problems had
solutions, one would expect them to be uncovered by now. Some say
fluorescents began in 1856 when Heinrich Geissler created a *mercury* <g>
vacuum pump that was much more efficient than any other of the time. When
current was applied through the "Geissler tube", it glowed.  Commercial
fluorescents didn't really hit the market in force until after their debut
by GE at the 1939 World's Fair.

Either way, that's a long head start for fluorescents to just now be almost
neck and neck with LEDs, a nascent technology that's only really been a home
lighting contender for 10 years at most. Because it's difficult to sustain
an arc in a fluorescent tube at low power levels, CFLs will probably never
equal tungsten or LED lights when it comes to smooth, linear dimming.

My contention is that these subtle, but persistent CFL flaws (size,
incompatibility with existing timers, photocell-controlled lamps, dimmers,
X-10 and the like) mean that LEDs *have* to rule to roost, eventually.
Competition is a fascinating thing, summed up by the old joke punchline: "I
don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!" Even very
slight-seeming advantages can add up to a killer blow over the long haul.
The CFL is running hard, but true LED "cold light" will win the race, even
over a characteristic as lowly as higher resistance to breakage. All the
studies I've seen say LEDs have much greater "room to grow" in both
efficiency and cheaper production costs than CFLs and should surpass them
very soon in both categories.

> I read a lot about LEDs before trying those initial 12V MR16 landscape
> lights. The DOE CALiPER reports on Solid-State Lighting indicate that
> reliability and brightness fall-off are major problems for LED lighting.

I agree completely. The current landscape of LED offerings is hauntingly
reminiscent of the introduction of CFLs. Cheap, crappy products and
hyper-expensive products dominated the landscape; the early adopters who
tried them rejected them and developed long-lasting negative attitudes
towards them. This has acted as quite a drag on their acceptance.

The reports of CFL penetration say time and time again that people who try
them and have issues like a smoky, stinky burnout are much more reluctant to
try them a second time. My wife hates both the occasional very spectacular
stinky burn-up and the frequent flickering and has had me stock up on
incandescents for her sewing room and all the hallway and critical short
on/off time lights that never last as long as the makers claim.

As for reliability, that's not so clear cut. Take for instance an LED
traffic light. Made up of many LED elements, they are far more reliable on
the whole than the tungsten bulbs they replace. CFL's are so wimpy, they
need not even apply for this job! An LED element failure in a stop or tail
light still leaves a lot of other LEDs elements to continue to shine. Since
the LEDs can produce incredibly pure red light, there's no energy loss
involved in filtering white light to get the red color.

> Progress is being made, and eventually another technology will supercede
> CFLs. From my limited testing, the LEDs aren't there yet.

Agreed. But they're close enough that the mercury element should make the
decision between the two a no-brainer, at least if someone *really* cares
about the environment. It's bad reasoning to believe that putting mercury in
perhaps 3 billion consumer bulbs will magically offset mercury in smokestack
exhausts. That's especially true now because the Feds are finally getting
off their butts and invoking the *right* solution: enforcing mercury
emission laws. Once that happens, the tradeoff fails.

Far worse, we've created a brand-new mercury dispersal system that reaches
every corner of the country, even areas where they get most of their
electricity from dams or other non-coal sources and there was never any
value to the trade-off to begin with. Do you really want grandkids with
lifelong neurological problems because you want to save on your electric
bill? Or your light bulb costs? Or because the color of the light isn't
quite right?  I don't.

What worries me the most is the cost of remediation if we eventually find
that many more than 630,000 newborns a year have mercury levels way above
recommendations. Lots of folks here know the incredible costs and issues
involved in removing asbestos or lead paint from a home. Mercury abatement
has the potential to make removing those two hazards look like child's play.
Who will pay for the care of kids born with brain damage because we didn't
realize CFL's were such a hazard? We will. With yet more tax dollars.

Like climate change, these processes take time and I suspect that mercury is
only now entering the environment from pre-ban alkaline batteries that went
into dumps years ago. What happens when the CFL bulbs start getting to dumps
in big numbers? We just don't know, and so we should consider how deeply we
get into something that could make the US one giant Superfund site. We put
deposit requirements on innocuous glass soda bottles but not on "special
needs recycling" hazardous material bearing CFL's. That's idiotic.  When the
choice was just CFL v. incandescent, the tradeoff worked, but now there's a
serious new contender, the LED, and it's far greener than the CFL because it
uses no mercury.

On the whole, people have a hard time evaluating the threat of materials
like mercury and carcinogens like asbestos and TCE because the cause and
effect are sometimes years, even decades, apart. But the cancer statistics,
state by state prove that certain areas produce statistically meaningful
clusters of deaths. Sadly, those clusters tend to be in areas with large
manufacturing operations.

http://www3.cancer.gov/atlasplus/new.html

We already know that trace amounts of mercury can be very toxic, especially
to the fetuses of pregnant women. They have been told each year that it's
increasingly less safe for them to eat any fish at all. As far back as 2004,
the EPA raised a red flag:

"E.P.A. Raises Estimate of Babies Affected by Mercury Exposure - More than
one child in six born in the United States could be at risk for
developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother's womb,
according to revised estimates released last week by Environmental
Protection Agency scientists. The agency doubled its estimate, equivalent to
630,000 of the 4 million babies born each year, because recent research has
shown that mercury tends to concentrate in the blood in the umbilical cord
of pregnant women." Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/science/epa-raises-estimate-of-babies-affected-by-mercury-exposure.html

> There is a brighter 12V MR16 LED available now, but it costs 3X as much as
the Feit
> CFLs. It is hard to justify replacing an inexpensive halogen with a $20
LED
> having unknown longevity.

It's not hard to justify if there's a hidden downside to CFLs: poisoning the
next generation of Americans. Efficiency and longevity of LEDs has been
increasing greatly in just the past few years. Here's a study done by
Carnagie Mellon:

http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/publications/pdfs/ssl/matthews_chicago09.pdf

They concur that LED lighting still has a long way to go, but that it's
closing ground fast and it's going to very rapidly overtake CFLs in nearly
every category when those eventual improvements arrive. That only makes
sense since commercial fluorescent technology is at least 70 years old.
CFL's may be a new form factor, but the technology is considered by some to
outdate the tungsten filament bulb.

Stokes at Cambridge discovered electrical fluorescence in 1852, which by
some accounts makes it well over 150 years old. That's a lot of time for the
damn things to remain so buggy compared to a simple incandescent bulb. And
it's precisely why they'll fail against LEDs. One of the most cynical
touches in the film "Blade Runner" is Harrison Ford having to flick the
glass bulb of a future fluorescent bulb to get it to come on. It's a
prediction that even in the future, those damn fluorescent bulbs will not
have improved very much.

> People harp on the mercury used in CFLs. Mercury has been used in
> fluorescent lighting for decades.

Yes, that's true. Asbestos also saw incredibly widespread use before people
realized it was a potent carcinogen. Use for decades really doesn't mean
safe. It takes a long time for waste in dumps to percolate. It takes even
longer for experts to "put it all together" as in the case of asbestos,
whose use continued many years after its lethal effects were *very* well
known. There's already a lot of mercury seeping into the ground in
landfills. While most of the environmental mercury currently does appear to
come from power plant emissions, those are relatively easy fixes. Why didn't
Obama and Congress spend the stimulus money on scrubbing dirty power plant
stacks and not on million dollar "retention" bonuses for fat cat bankers?

While most mercury in CFL's appears just a trifling few milligrams, some
sources claim that 5mg of mercury can contaminate 6,000 gallons of drinking
water. This site talks about some of the common sense things we so easily
overlook:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23694819/

"It's kind of ironic that on the one hand, the agency [EPA] is saying, 'Don'
t worry, it's a very small amount of mercury.' Then they have a whole page
of [instructions] how to handle the situation if you break one . . ."

When you start to talk about 2 or 3 billion light bulbs, that 5mg (or even
1mg in the newer bulbs) becomes a significant amount in the aggregate.
Couple that to Americans and their incredibly low recycling compliance (last
I checked it was 6% or so), it's very likely to spell serious trouble,
especially if the conclusion that only 5mg of mercury can contaminate 6,000
gallons of water proves true. I haven't read the paper they're referring to,
but based on EPA's schizoid recommendations on CFLs, I have no reason to
doubt it.

> One report I read said the mercury used in fluorescent bulbs is much less
than the

> amount that would have been released into the environment by burning coal
to

> produce an equivalent amount of incandescent light.

That's only because the EPA under Bush was basically prevented from cleaning
up the dirtiest of the coal plants. Didn't the "indirect approach" of the
Feds giving money to the banks that created the financial meltdown have
little effect on the foreclosure rate? That should tell us that indirect
methods tend to be political creations that can't be relied upon. Clean up
the stacks and the alleged tradeoff that people so frequently tout turns
into nothing more that a new vector for getting toxic mercury into every
garbage dump in America.

Do we really want to condemn 10's of thousands or more children to living
with birth defects because we want lower electric bills or we want a
slightly warmer-colored light no matter what the environmental cost? Not me.
It's bad enough that we're laying the cost of the bailout, two failed wars
and a fraud-riddled Medicare system on them. Must we poison them, too?

> As we move away from carbon based fuels, that tradeoff will diminish.

>And it is even better with LEDs. But do we know for sure that trace

> elements used in LED production will not also turn out
> to be harmful to the environment?

The Mellon study referenced above, among others, looked at those very
questions by examining every step of the process and how much power it used.
Look on page 25 for the graph that compares production costs of CFL,
incandescent and LEDs. Scientists are a lot better at accounting for the
real costs of items these days, looking at the entire life cycle of a
product to determine what it costs, money and environmental hazard-wise, to
produce items like LEDs and CFLs.

A lot of Pacific ocean mercury comes from the stacks of the Chinese coal
plants powering the manufacture of CFL bulbs. The US stood poised to lead
the world in developing LED technology, but instead, we're shoring up banks
that caused the mess we're in.

Ironically, those banks, with lots of help from the same Congress that's
mandating the new bulbs, have turned that wonderful, "seems like a good
idea" invention called the credit card into the near downfall of the world's
economy. Not every new idea is a good idea and some of them, like giving
women estrogen to prevent breast cancer, turned out to be EXACTLY the wrong
thing to do. Actual studies, rather than "feel good, should work" guesses
showed that the treatments actually increased the risk of breast cancer and
they were stopped.

Nothing I've seen in the literature so far suggests that LED bulbs contain
anything as near as toxic as mercury. In the past LEDs contained arsenic
compounds, but most of the newer diodes do not. Because the world is
generally awakening to the idea that little amounts of poison add up, Apple
stopped using arsenic in its LCD panels in 2008. Remember, LEDs fulfill the
same promise as CFLs of reduced power plant emissions, but they do it
without the insane tradeoff of involving a known deadly poison whose levels
are so high pregnant women are told not to eat tuna.

> There are companies working on a new generation of lighting. One is still
> based on CFL technology. Only time will tell whether one of these becomes
> dominant in the marketplace.

Sometimes, the marketplace isn't the best determiner of what's good for
society. That lesson seems abundantly clear in the aftermath of the current
financial mess we're in. If we know that mercury is toxic and that
scientists believe great improvements in LEDs are coming, does it make sense
to push a bad technology like CFLs forward by government mandate? This is
toxic stuff and George Orwell wouldn't be surprised at how easily we now
swallow big lies like "adding mercury will take away mercury." Here's how
the indirect solution is working out in the real world:

<"MONDAY, Aug. 24 (HealthDay News) -- A study involving more than 6,000
American women suggests that blood levels of mercury are accumulating over
time, with a big rise noted over the past decade.

"Using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a researcher from
the University of California, Los Angeles, found that while inorganic
mercury was detected in the blood of 2 percent of women aged 18 to 49 in the
1999-2000 NHANES survey, that level rose to 30 percent of women by
2005-2006."> Source:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_88506.html