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Panic merchants would have you in a Hazmat suit to clean up a broken fluoro because there’s a trace of mercury in it. Obviously, you want to avoid contact with mercury, but you are not likely to poisoned by a single breakage. The real problem is stacks of old tubes contaminating landfill. So you have to recycle them to prevent serious quantities of mercury accumulating in landfill. LEDs don’t have that problem.
Most conventional lights are glass and can shatter. Not fun to clean up and sometimes a serious hazard. LEDs overwhelmingly make use of plastic diffusers and lenses so you’re able to get away with dropping them. And the LED chips themselves are less delicate than filaments, which helps make them more durable.
In some parts of Australia you can get a discount on your installation of approved LEDs. There are 3 state government schemes in SA, NSW and Victoria. You’re likely to need someone to do the paperwork, but there are savings to be had. Get in while it lasts.
How would you go about putting three colour temperatures or dual intensity switches on anything other than LED? LEDs’ flexibility gives you a win/win with contractors having to carry less gear and the customer able to change their mind on the spot.
Some say that because LEDs don’t put out anything like the heat of the old incandescents you can save on air conditioning. The heat from an old incandescent bulb roughly adds up to what you’d get from a person, so you’d be better off just kicking people out of the room. But the lack of intense heat does mean that LED downlights aren’t a fire hazard like some of their predecessors.
Nothing lasts forever, but if you only run your LEDs for 5 hours a night they will probably last 27 years. That’s a good stretch of time not to have to bother about a light. And it’s a lot better than changing globes all the time.
LED chips fit all styles of lighting. If you want, you can put them in glass bulbs and have pretend incandescent filaments. The main reason LED battens mimic flourescents is because that’s what people are used to. But not only do LEDs mimic conventional lights, they make new styles of lighting possible. These days you can run LED strip lights anywhere – under cupboards for a bit of extra bench light or wherever you think they look good.
LEDs switch on straight away and don’t mind constant switching. That’s better than that annoying lag or warm up you get with compact fluoros. It means LEDs work well with sensors that turn the light up and down and on and off all the time. It doesn’t wear them out and means you can have smart lights in home automation systems.
If you take the faintest interest in lighting, you know that LED is the most efficient form of lighting. They use less power and are cheaper to run. All LED versions of downlights and battens and floodlights draw less than half the power of the old school lights.
It doesn’t matter what we say about how great LED is. The really convincing argument is that everything else is going to be banned in a few years’ time. Halogen will be off the shelf by 2020. Even the environmentalists’ old friend the compact fluorescent is being phased out in Europe. That means lists about the advantages of LED are on the way out too.
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