Light on a Stick…The Video
So this is a quick and raw video of one of our new products that can be found on the website. It’s the Eternaleds Lumistick. It’s 4.5 watts of PURE POWER! But seriously, it’s actually pretty bright and small enough to put anywhere, like under a kitchen cabinet, or in a drawer. Which also means that I have a lot of ideas for some arts and crafts for it. Imagine taking two of these and attaching it to an AC battery back, adding a red tinted filter to it, then running around in a park. Can you say Instant Lightsaber? That is one of my ideas for a video in the next coming months. If you have any questions about it or if you’re interested in seeing any other Eternaleds bulbs in action, post in the comments. Enjoy!
Luke, I am your father.
X-Prize…..Light Bulb Style.
As long as there's money involved...
Its always hard to push innovation for the sake of innovation, if there’s no immediate need or immediate benefit from it. Its kind of like procrastinating from doing that term paper since it’s not due until the end of the year. The later you start on it, the less time you have though, to make it good. So along the same line of the X-Prize, the Department of Energy has sponsored the Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize (L-Prize for short) to try to kick the asses of the industry to create something amazing while there’s still time before the “end of the semester”.
The contest is to see who can make a 10-watt replacement for the 60-watt incandescent bulb. The contest was introduced last May, and requires that the lights last 25,000 hours (at 4 hours a day, that’s 17 years!) That’s actually not too difficult, as our 10-watt bulbs are almost at that 60W mark. The “deal-breaker” as far one of the guidelines go, is that the price should go down to $8 a bulb by the third year of production. Now that’s probably the biggest hurdle. Like any emerging technology, the earlier designs, before they become mainstream, are going to cost a considerable amount more. But then it becomes a Catch-22. We can produce the bulbs for a lot less once people start buying more, but we people won’t start buying more until we can produce them for less. Something here has to give for the wheels to start turning, and hopefully the straw that will break the camel’s back will the want for innovation, rather than the need because we have no choice.
The DOE says that if every household in the U.S. switched all their bulbs to LEDs, you could save enough energy in a year to power everything in Las Vegas for two full years. That’s a lot of incentive in terms of energy saved. If you look at any large-sized company, there is a ton of space that is used as their working environment, and to light up something like that, you must be able to see the cost benefits of switching to eneergy efficient lighting. Well, hopefully this prize can be handed out sooner than later, because time is slowly ticking away….
Ushering In a New Standard…With the Chevy Volt
Chevy Volt…Yay!
Ok so we’re finally ALMOST there. I was lurking through my favorite blog the other day, and they seem to have put up some new ads on their site. This time, it’s about the Chevy Volt. For those that have been living under a rock, the Volt is supposed to be the “new hotness” when it comes to green vehicles. Now it does not have the fame of being the first well-known “green” car (that honor would go to the very homely Honda Insight) but it is the first highly publicized made-for-the-general-public primarily electric model.
When I say primarily, I mean that it still swings both ways, but definitely has a penchant towards liberal rather than republican. It’s getting all the attention because even though it has the same overall parts as the past hybrids, this one has a trick up its sleeve. Through normal everyday driving, providing it’s under 40 miles, the car will use only use electrical power. So if you’re going back and forth from work everyday, then you never have to fill up the tank. Once it goes beyond that, the battery won’t be able to keep up and the engine kicks on. Pretty novel idea and seems like something that a lot of people are excited about.
This is not by any means the holy grail (since it still sips dead dinosaur juice), but from a usability standpoint, goes a long way towards almost never having to fill up a tank. One of my good friends swore that he would get one when it comes out, so if that happens, I will definitely be doing an in-depth review of the experience. Or maybe I should just go to the lot for a test drive….
Either way, I’m definitely excited about the possibilities of it all, and maybe in a few years, we can completely wean ourselves away from foreign and domestic oil, for the better of the economy, and ultimately, the planet.
[Via Chevy Volt]
Apple(s)…is(are)…Green?
So Apple, who had only a year and a half ago, won the top….err…bottom spot by a good margin of the LOWEST score of “un-green-est” electronics company by Greenpeace, have now turned a new leaf, at least when it comes to the new iPod nano. No mercury and recyclable? That’s a good thing. Now the nano is such a small piece of sexy kit, that what should it matter if there’s a bit of unhealthy stuff, you may ask?
Just like they say, the secret is strength in numbers. With iPod selling over 160 million iPods worldwide since its inception, even 1mg of mercury and other harmful elements will add up in the environment. This argument can also be duplicated for fluorescents bulbs. The smaller compact variety average about 4mg of mercury per bulb (more for large versions) and the longer office fluorescents range from 6-25mg per linear tube. In the U.S. alone, consumers have bought over 300 million bulbs just in 2007 (Wal-mart themselves pledged to sell 100 million the year before). Now extrapolate that to how much mercury that is (easily over 5000 lbs) and it looks like we’re starting to have a problem. Where does all that mercury go? Ideally, we would take all our bulbs and electronics and had them over to a recycling facility, where IDEALLY they would recycle and reuse it. But we don’t live in an ideal world. The reality is that it goes to wherever it makes sense fiscally and conveniently. The dollar(or is it the Euro now) is king. And we’re lazier than we’d like to be. But at least by “greening” things it doesn’t give us the option to handle harmful goods. And that’s all we can ask for right now…
Greenpeace rating for companies 2006
Here’s how the other companies are doing this year, as according to Greenpeace.
[Via Gizmodo Live Blog and Greenpeace]
We Got Reviewed!….(Again)
This website is crazy with it's new LED products for eyes and a mouth.
We were reviewed by The LED Museum. Yay! This is the second Eternaleds bulb review (since that first one a few months ago) that we’ve gotten so it’s good to see our name out there. LED Museum is run by a really nice guy by the name of Craig Johnson since 1999 and he’s done reviews on a ton of different LED-types of products from light bulbs to flashlights to nightlights and kids toys. I checked his site and he’s got thousands of reviews of various things that twinkle. The nice thing is he’s got pictures of the beam of the lights on a wall so you can see how the spread looks and how bright it is.
He’s got a bunch of tech specs of some of our more popular bulbs, and when I asked him how to read the graphs and results on his chart, he said
“The spectrographic analysis is simply a representation of the lamp’s output at hundreds of different wavelengths in the visible spectrum ranging from violet to deep red; the spectrum of this bulb shows a lower than normal “blue” peak (this is light emission from the actual LED die under the phosphor) and a higher than usual phosphor emission – this is what helps define it as “WARM white” rather than the cooler (bluer) white found in most other LED products including light bulbs…so yes, that’s a GOOD thing when you advertise the bulb as “warm white”. 
….The beam cross-sectional analysis isn’t nearly as necessary, but shows (along with the photographs) that this bulb has a very wide viewing angle – also a good thing to have in a light bulb. 
“
His site is a little bit old school design-wise, but you could spend hours looking at all the different things he’s reviewed. Check out what he said for our HP-10 Globe, HP-3 Mini-Flood, and our new LumiStick.
From Gas Light to LEDs…That’s a Jump!
Those crazy Germans.
Rather than using fossil fuels to create electricity and use the electricity to create light, the town of Dusseldorf has for many years, skipped that unneeded step and burned the gas directly in lamps to create light. I don’t know exactly how much light gas lamps can produce, but that’s probably a lot of extra carbon being pumped into the air.
The municipal power utility is trying out a new plan to replace all their gas lamps with LED lights. Of the 17,000 gas lamps in the city, about 10,000 will be replaced with LED spotlights.
So far only two dozen have been replaced as a test and people are already unhappy saying the light is rather cold (did you see the pun?). Ulrich Kuiper, who developed the lamps says that he will use warmer LED colors (there’s the pun again) for future lamps. My question would be “How all those Germans will be able to light their cigars at night when they forget their lighter?” But I guess eventually LEDs will be hot enough to do that too. Just kidding. LED’s don’t get that hot.
[Via The Economist]
Samsung Creates….and Samsung Destroys
Awww…they make plants now.
My boy Sammy is really making some new ground this past year or so moving into new markets with its fuel cells, iPhone-clones, and more recently, netbooks. Now beginning Oct 1st, they’re foraying into the new current hotness trend that’s taking over western civilization – GREEN CONSUMERISM! With all the new products they’re creating, they must be running out of raw materials right? Where do we get more? From OLD materials! I do applaud them for making the effort and it does make sense I suppose with this new scheme they’re calling Recycling Direct. Unfortunately, this helps but a small subset of consumers, namely the ones that bought Samsung’s products to begin with as that is the only type they will accept for free (there is a fee for other brands). I can see the conversation going like this :
“Hi, I’d like to recycle my old cell phone.”
“Is it a Samsung?”
“No, it’s a Nokia.”
“So?”
“You will have to pay a fee for us to take Non-Samsung products.”
“Oh ok. I’ll just recycle it into this garbage can here. I don’t think it will charge me anything.”
Oh well. I guess you can’t win them all. There will be fixed dropoff points in all 50 states that coincide with other recycling programs in the area. Now get out there and buy Samsung!
BONUS : Did you know you can mine bars of gold out of old cell phones?
[Recycling Direct Via Crave]