According to the recently issued “Notice of ban on the import and sale of general incandescent lamps” from NDRC, from 1st of October 2012, incandescent lamps will be gradually banned to import and sale depending on specific power consumption. It is estimated that by 2016, incandescent lamps will completely vanish from the stage of market. In the mean while, with the implement of various energy-saving policies from government, energy-saving lamps and LED lighting applications will vigorously developed in the near future. However, which one will occupy the lighting market and win the final battle? In this article, we will do some comparisons between these two types of lamps.
CFL compact fluorescent lamps having the same luminous flux (brightness) with incandescent lamps only consume 1/4 energy of them. Compared with traditional incandescent lights, CFL lamps can save a lot of energy. Thus they are also called energy-saving lamps.
LED is a kind of semiconductor component, which can convert electrical energy into optical energy. With the same level of luminous flux, the energy consuming of LED lighting applications is only 1/3 of incandescent lights. In addition, LED lights can be intelligently controlled. Intelligent technology can dramatically increase the efficiency of LED lighting applications and meanwhile reduce management costs.
In accordance with the quality standard of energy-saving lamps, the average service life of energy-saving lamps is around 6000 hours. Some giant lighting enterprises have even more stringent requirements on the service life of their products, like new type spiral energy-saving lamps, the average service life can reach up to 10,000 hours (about 1 years). After 10,000 hours’ constant work, the light intensity will dropped to 30%.
In theory, the average service life of LED lights is around 50,000 hour – 80,000 hours (5 years – 9 years). It has been proved that many LED products (small lights) in the market can maintain a light intensity around 60% of the initial output after 50,000 hours’ constant works. Some manufacturers even announced that their LED lights can maintain a normal work after 100,000 hours. However, all these are theoretical values which have been measured or estimated in ideal conditions (constant temperature, constant humidity and constant current). In practices, the service life of LED lighting applications will be much less than these.