In 2009, the leader of the global lighting industry – Philips, formally promoted LED home lights, listing LED residential lighting applications as one of their main developing directs in the next ten years. Meanwhile, another household lighting giant – OSRAM also promoted dimmable LED ceiling mounted lamps, to seize the market in an early time. All these implied the potentials and hopes of LED home lights dominating the residential lighting market.
However, Professor Dahua Chen from the Lighting Research Institute of Fudan University indicated that “Although LED technologies have huge developing potentials in the lighting area, it still will take them decades years to become the mainstream in the residential lighting applications, mainly because of their bottlenecks in the research and development, and their immature in the product qualities.” Professor Chen did not hold out much hope on this part. LED can only play a supporting role in the household lighting applications.
LED is a type of solid-state semiconductor component, which can directly convert electricity to light. As the new generation light source, LED technology has many incomparable advantages: a. safe; LED must work under low DC voltage. LED home lights are much safer than other high-voltage lighting devices and more suitable for household applications. b. energy-saving; consuming only 80% energy but send out same light (same brightness/luminous flux) with incandescent lamps. Buyers can save their energy and money together. c. environmental friendly; LED is made from non-toxic materials, aluminum/aluminum alloy, causing no contamination to environment and recyclable. d. long service life. Theoretically, the average lifetime of LED chips can reach up to 100,000 hours (when light attenuation approaching 50%). Even LED lamps can have a working life of 50,000 hours. e. sturdy and durable; Basically, LED is just a small chip encapsulated in epoxy resin, then put into aluminum/aluminum alloy lamp fixtures. Compare with incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes, which are only under the protection of glass covers, LED lamps are much more durable. f. small sized; This feature enable LED lights to be made in multiple shapes and sustainable in various working conditions. This is also a designer-welcome feature, which provides more creative space for them. Some impressive lighting designs even can combine fixture designs with furniture designs, achieving the “invisible light source effect”. g. brightness and color adjustable; this feature can meet the special requirements of stage lighting as well as household lighting.