Lights in Shining Armor

Are LED bulbs able to prevent from excessive power payments? Final yr I visited Change Lighting, a small Silicon Valley firm that claimed to have built something revolutionary. Switch’s product: a light bulb that produced the same warm, comforting glow that we associate with Edison’s enduring incandescent bulb however lasts 20 occasions longer and makes use of a fraction of the vitality. It was lovely, too. A pear-formed glass orb that sat atop a shiny metallic heatsink, the Switch bulb looked like a work of art. Best of all, it was remarkably affordable. The Swap bulb was going to cost $20, however over its 20-yr-lifespan-sure, 20 years! A hundred in power over an incandescent bulb. I was received over. In my story-"The World’s Biggest Gentle Bulb"-I promised that when the Swap bulbs went on sale in the fall of 2011, I’d be buying them for my home. I wasn’t the just one who was thrilled by the prospect of an ideal gentle bulb.



Wired put the same Swap bulb that I’d hailed on its cover. There was only tiny problem with the bulb that Wired and that i went gaga for: It was by no means launched. The company says that it ran into unexpected manufacturing challenges, and late final yr it had to go back to the drawing board. The firm fully redesigned the bulb with an eye fixed to creating it easier to manufacture. The good news is that the newly designed Change bulb is now on sale. You may pick one up at a Batteries Plus store near you. The dangerous news is that the Switch isn’t the perfect bulb. For one factor, slightly than $20, a Swap bulb that’s equal to a 60-watt incandescent now costs $50. What’s more, in my testing, the Change bulb’s glow doesn’t fairly match the quality of light put out by an incandescent bulb. And it’s not simply Switch: Over the last few days, I’ve been testing 4 completely different LED light bulbs that at the moment are accessible for sale.