"Fluorescent-Killing" Bikei LED Tube Lamp
Lighting consumes as much as a third of the energy budget of industrialized nations. This amounts to massive carbon dioxide emissions, and high expenses. Cutting even a fraction of these costs seems an attractive option.
LED lighting has arisen as a potential challenger to these older designs. It features a high efficiency, using less than 60 percent of the power of incandescent lighting and sometimes even less than fluorescents. And while costs of LED lighting are currently high, key breakthroughs have helped to send prices dropping into the realm of affordability.
For businesses that currently have fluorescent tube lighting looking to jump on the LED trend, there is a commercial option at last -- well, if they're in Japan, at least. Toshin Electric Co Ltd, a Japanese firm has released the Bikei LED tube lamp.
The tube lamp is designed as a drop-in replacement for fluorescent tubes (not to be confused with compact fluorescent bulbs, aka. CFLs) and features a long silicon substrate with lots of LEDs mounted on it, enclosed in a glass tube. The unit is be a bit pricey at $306 compared to around $14 for a fluorescent tube. However, the rated life is 40,000 hours, nearly 8 times the normal life of a standard fluorescent tube. Another perk is that the LED tubes are mercury-free, while traditional fluorescent tubes feature toxic mercury.
The LED tube also consumes only 20 to 24 watts, about half of what similar fluorescent bulbs its size do. It outputs 370 lumens, which is less than a traditional fluorescent tube, but has superior color quality to the emitted light, something office workers will, no doubt, appreciate.
Toshin plans to market the tubes to factory and store owners as well as local municipalities which employ fluorescent lighting in train stations and tunnels, or in street lamps. If you're a business owner in the U.S. and are as geeked about LED lighting as we are, unfortunately you'll have to wait for now. However, the market is growing fast, so it shouldn't be long before these designs hit the States as well.
via: GoodCleanTech
