Turning on to LED Light Bulbs

The Future of Household Lighting Begins Now

Many people have heard of LED lights, especially since they are used to illuminate many of the new electronics that have emerged in the past few years. Still, the way LED lights work remains a mystery to some, so, just to clarify, LED (which stands for “Light Emitting Diodes”) is a bunch of tiny lights that are clustered together to form one big one—all of these small ones sharing one massive circuit. They operate from the collision of electrons within a silicon semiconductor and unlike regular (incandescent) light bulbs, they don’t burn out because there’s no filament involved.

The fact that LED light bulbs don’t burn out is one plus, the other major benefit is that they don’t use much electricity at all. For instance, with a typical home-use LED light bulb (18 LED with either 120 or 12 volts) you can expect it to run 12 hours per day for about a year. The cost works out to between 80 to 90 cents for the entire year. Imagine the cost and energy savings if you were to equip the entire house with LED bulbs. Although the savings would be tremendous in the long, the major downfall for the LED market is that these babies are pretty expensive. As an example, the type of bulb I mentioned above will run between $35 and $45 and when you consider how many lights you have in your home, you’ll see the price looks less and less attractive after all.