Philips MASTER LED Retrofit lamps |
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| Compact Flourescent
Lamps (CFLs) have long been the "green" solution that many retail
outlets, hotels and home users have looked to in order to reduce their
energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint. Whilst CFLs promise
this and have, until recently, been the only alternative to the now
illegal old-school incandescent lighting, users have had to make a
number of compromises in switching to CFL. The technology has gradually
caught up with users' needs but the CFL still has a number of flaws, as
highlighted in Channel 9's A Current Affair. The flourescent dust used to coat the inside of the tube contains toxic heavy metals such as mercury, something of a paradox given that governments in Europe and other places have enacted legislation banning the use of heavy metals in electronics in order to prevent groundwater contamination. (They had to give CFLs a specific exemption from the EU's RoHS regs.) This toxicity makes safe disposal of CFLs something of an issue. They have very few recyclable components and when you combine the energy used in that disposal, the landfill they take up and the energy used in their manufacture, the amount of energy saved during their useful life becomes near enough negligable compared with their environmental impact as a whole.   |
| Use
of the words "Low Voltage Halogen" is a little deceptive. Low voltage
does not mean low power consumption and with many halogen's
rated lamp life at 5,000 hours, those of us who've had them
know all too well the regularity with which the things need replacing
and how hot they get, sometimes blackening the area around the fitting. Typically, a retail or hospitality setting will use a large number of 70W halogen downlights. You may even have some in your home. Assuming a user runs 10 x 50W lamps for 8 hours a day over the course of a year, those 10 lamps will burn for a total of 29,200 hours. That's 1,460 units of electricity at $0.20 a unit, coming to $292 a year in electricity alone. The LED equivalent uses just 10W to product the same amount of light. Replacing the 10 halogens our hypothetical user owns with LED will cut his/her usage to 292 units of electricity over the same period. That's $58.40, an 80% saving. What's more, with a rated lamp life of five times that of the halogen they won't have to replace the things for years and they run cool enough to touch.  |
| We like the MASTER LED range so much that we've
replaced all the office lighting we can with them. We've even got them
running in our display Philips Selecon Aureols. Check out our range of Philips MASTER LED bulbs here |
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