Following on from the Mail’s highly embarrassing crusade to prevent energy-inefficient and environment-destroying incandescent bulbs from being phased out (and all because of those damned Johnny Foreigners in the EU. Eh. What), it reported this week that a bulb costing only £2 with a life expectancy of 60 years had been developed.
A lighting revolution is on the way that could end at the flick of a switch the battle between supporters of conventional bulbs and the eco-friendly variety.
It goes on to describe this ‘brand new’ invention:
Cambridge University researchers have developed cheap, light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs that produce brilliant light but use very little electricity. They will cost £2 and last up to 60 years.
Despite being smaller than a penny, they are 12 times more efficient than conventional tungsten bulbs and three times more efficient than the unpopular fluorescent low-energy versions.
Erm, Mail-guys! They may cost £2 each, but a typical usable light bulb will need perhaps 5-10 of them inside. So your later comment involves a little bit of misunderstanding:
But until now the production costs have been too expensive for widespread use because the material had to be ‘grown’ on sapphire wafers, meaning a single household bulb would have cost £20.
A household bulb using these LEDs will still cost anywhere between £10-20, depending on how many LEDs it has inside. And the Maplin LED Strip I mentioned in the original story only costs £19 and has 36 ultra-bright LEDs on it (that’s about 53p per LED, Mail-guys!)
Maplin LED Light Strip – type 1
I suspect the Mail is trying (very badly) to dig itself out of the huge hole it dug over that free lightbulb offer to its crusty, middle-England readership – who, incidentally, are still flooding this site with hits based on the search term ‘Daily Mail free lightbulb offer’.
Of course, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that high-brightness LEDs have been around since at least 2007 . No, wait! Maybe since 2005 (and they’re made of Gallium Nitride – the same Philosopher’s Stone the Mail claims this fantastic new discovery is fashioned from). The Mail’s journo’s are a real joke sometimes – they can’t research any science story properly.
The cost of high-brightness LEDs will come down – everyone knows that. It’s just a shame that the kind of people who would happily sacrifice the planet to prevent the EU telling them what to do can’t get it into their heads that even now £20-30 for a bulb which never wears out and uses a fraction of the power is better than paying 70p repeatedly for something which breaks every few months and costs a fortune to run by comparison.
But that’s the typical Daily Mail reader for you. It’s no wonder we’re still stuck with a nonsensical Imperial measuring system and Sterling when metric and the Euro are just sitting there begging to be used.