BoingX2 - LED's Throwing Some Light on the Hype
An LED light that can replace the incandescent bulbs and/or CFLs you have lighting up your home right now. To do it right, you don't just need a single LED that works, you need an array of them...and you need them to produce enough light, and the right color of light, reliably enough that people can buy an LED bulb and know what they're getting into.That ain't easy. But it is getting easier.
There Are Good LED Lights Out There; But You Probably Can't Afford Them
See, the LED industry is kind of in this awkward teenage phase right now... There's a lot of misrepresentation and a lot of flat-out lies, and just because a box says something that doesn't mean you can believe it (more so than boxes of other things). In fact, up until last year, there weren't really any useful standards to compare LED lights. Anybody could make any claim they wanted to and even the professionals had nothing to judge it by. That's changing, but for now, assume you're dealing with the early 20th-century patent medicine industry.
Again, yes, there are good products and there are honest companies. But finding them takes a LOT of research.
The DOE is trying to fix that, though. One way they're fighting back is with CALiPER, basically a secret-shopper program with a lab experiment twist. Researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (and other labs) purchase LED bulbs and fixtures anonymously (often via third-parties) and run them through an extensive testing process to see whether they live up to the claims on the box. The majority still don't, though it's getting better. More than 175 products have been tested since 2006.
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