Sg Appliances

With growing concern about climate change, governments around the world are looking for ways to reduce greenhouse gases and to reduce consumption of fossile fuels. One simple solution that has gained government support is phasing out energy-inefficient light bulbs and replacing them with energy-efficient ones.

With energy rates climbing, we know LED lights use so much less power than most traditional lighting technologies for a number of reasons.

First, they are very efficient at converting electrical power to light, but even more significant, luminaries using them do not have to output as many lumens of light to get the same or nearly the same effective lighting.

What is LED Light?
LED stands for "light emitting diode." Instead of having a filament to provide light, the LED light uses diodes. A diode hosts electrons moving inside of semiconductor material, which thus generates light. The light created within these diodes is a cool light, as opposed to the heated light in an incandescent bulbs filament.

Let's Find Out How Much We Can Save

Watts
Normally we speak by incandescent bulbs about the amount of watts. Because of this watts is seen as an indication of this emitted light, but the light emitted (light output) is actually shown in lumens.

Lumen
The lumen (lm) is a measured by the total amount of emitted light into a lightbeam. For example a 25 watt bulb give a lightbeam of 200 lm, for the same number of lumens, you only need 4 watts from a LED-light. Here is an overview:

(The chart above is based on averages, the actual data may be different depending on the type of LED-light and the manufacturer)

Imagine how many hundred watts of energy bill you are able to save should you convert your existing home lighting into LED lighting. If you can't do it at one go, do it one at a time.

It is time for Singaporean to look at this truly green technology; after all, we pay more for our energy than
many other places in the world.

If you are still using Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL), some important facts you may wish to know:

CFL bulbs should be careful in handling especially when it's broken - since they contain mercury. A 13 watt lamp released from 0.04 to perhaps 0.7 milligrams of mercury during the first 24 hours. Exposures should be negligible if the pieces are immediately picked up, nestled in paper and then discarded in a zip-it-up plastic bag or a sealed glass jar. To play it safe, it's recommended also to ventilating the room so that any residual gas shed by missed shards of glass won't accumulate.

Breaking a CFL while it's turned on can initially disperse a bigger puff of mercury vapor into the air than if its glass is damaged while the bulb if off. A more disturbing finding was how long a broken CFL can continue to release toxic vapors: a minimum of 43 days. Engineers calculation indicate that each CFL still contained enough residual elemental mercury at the end of testing to continue releasing the toxic substance into the air for at least 10 more days, and in one instance, for 85 more days.

If not cleaned up, the bulb with the largest initial store of mercury could have spewed 1 milligram of the toxic metal into a room's air within 25 days; another could have reached that level within about 40 days. Breaking a CFL can thus cause potentially toxic levels of pollution to develop.