If You Think You Understand Lighting, Then Read This

Advantages of LED Lighting

Today, light emitting diodes or LED lighting is the best when it come to energy saving and a smart solution compared to other methods of lighting available in the market today.

It started out by utilizing these diodes via a DC circuit to emit light to extend the battery life that is used for flashlights and other light emitting gadgets like cellphones and etc. it then included vehicular headlights by using specially designed reflectors, intensifying its brightness and the length of its coverage while still maintaining its efficiency. LED lighting can now be run from an AC supply which is very advantageous. So before they were only considered to be DC devices operating from a few volts of direct current but now has a more robust application that requires the same amount of voltage such as the linear strip lighting systems around the outside of a building that stretches for a hundred meters. This brings a different consideration because a DC drive suffers power loss over distance. So then it would require the use of a higher drive voltage once the voltages start to drop and so additional regulators need to be used to maintain the voltage. With alternating current of AC, this is not necessary since it is able to maintain the voltage despite the distances. This has always been the problem with DC power and the reason why it is not being used to transmit power across our streets and cities.

Today running LED lighting from an AC supply means converting your AC supply to produce DC power to operate your LED lights. Applications or options came to do that – converting AC to DC power to run LED lights. Today transformers are used to provide the required DC violated for many stand alone fixtures. LED light bulbs today can be screwed directly into a standard socket and these contain miniature circuits that convert AC to DC before being delivered to the LEDs. These types of LED lighting are very expensive upfront. However, there are a lot of people who would argue that despite the high upfront cost you would eventually lower your power bill remarkably.

Another early form is what is called the ‘Christmas tree light’ approach. Here multiple LEDs are connected in series so that the voltage drop across the whole string equals the supply voltage.

There are now attempts at developing true AC LEDs but this will be a big leap in technology that can be seen as an upgrade from analog to digital. And the advantages versus conventional lighting are so huge and of major benefit to both the user of this technology as well as our planet.