Reviews

CFL vs LED rate of adoption

I think it was sometime in 1997 when my college (Middlebury) ran an energy efficiency campaign and held a few sessions for students where they could learn about new technologies, such as CFL (Compact Fluorescent) bulbs. Those who attended were given their very own CFL bulb, for free. Prices then were about $20-30 per bulb. I used mine in my desk lamp, then took it with me when I graduated, and it made various moves with me, lighting various lamps of mine, until 1½ years ago, when it finally gave out one evening.

It was a spiral-type CFL bulb like the one you see below, it wasn’t a particularly powerful model, and it certainly took its time to get warm and reach its rated lumens (10-15 minutes), but I thought it was a cool concept and I was glad to do my bit for energy efficiency.

Nowadays, there are a ton of CFL bulb models, for both indoors and outdoors, made to fit all lamps, of all shapes and sizes, and even colors. I’m not just talking about different bulb temperatures, but also literally about bulb colors. I’ve seen blue, red, green and orange CFL bulbs — I don’t who’d buy them, but they’re out there.

They even have dimmable CFLs, which is a big deal for some people.

If you pause a moment to think about this, it took over 30 years for CFL technology to mature and reach the same sort of production and adoption levels as incandescent light bulbs, which were invented in 1879 by Thomas A. Edison [source]. CFL bulbs were invented by Ed Hammer from GE in 1976. Initially shelved by the company because they deemed the technology too expensive, the design leaked out and became popular [source]. Commercial models first came to the market in 1980 from Philips, then in 1985 from Osram [source]. I, along with many others, first heard of CFL bulbs as a new technology about 13 years ago, after they’d already been on the market for over 15 years.

LED (Light Emitting Diode) bulbs have an interesting history. The bulbs themselves as we know them today (replacements for CFL and incandescent bulbs) have a fairly short history, having only been introduced in 1999, although their ancestor, the now-humble light-emitting diode, has lived inside our electronics for decades. Unlike with incandescent and CFL bulbs, it’s much harder to attribute credit for them to any single person. Generally speaking, Nick Holonyak, an engineer at GE, is considered the inventor of individual LEDs, having made them in 1962. LED light bulbs are a different story altogether, and it’s much more of a group effort, with many people and companies working together to produce commercially viable versions of this new lighting technology.

It was the Philips company who came up with the first 1W LED bulbs in 1999. In 2002, Lumileds came out with 5W LEDs [source]. After that, progress came quicker. The key with LEDs is the ability to increase their light output to make them viable replacements for regular light bulbs. Newer, more powerful LEDs have been introduced since then by various companies such as Cree, Inc., Seoul Semiconductor, Nichia Corporation and others that have each been more powerful, brighter and efficient than their predecessors.

That brings us to where we are today, which is just a few short years since 1999 — relatively speaking. It’s 2010, and LED bulbs are getting massive press attention. There are already a ton of models on the market, from various companies, in various sizes, color temperatures and screw types. The only thing holding them back from mass adoption are their prices, which are still hovering above $30 per bulb. Some bulbs go as high as $50 or more.

There are distinct advantages to LED bulbs, or else they wouldn’t get all this attention. For one thing, they’re even more efficient than CFL bulbs, and for another, they contain no harmful mercury, unlike CFL bulbs. (Given the mercury levels contained in CFLs, it’s unfortunate and thoughtless of the EU to outlaw incandescent light bulbs as they did last year, in 2009.) Finally, LED bulbs last a LOT longer — their projected life span is 20-30 years, which is more than the 5-10 years we expect CFL bulbs to last.

Another benefit that doesn’t get as much airtime is their ability to operate at voltage ranges, not at specific voltages, which has been the case with all bulbs so far. I’ve seen LED bulbs that can operate from 85-250V, and that’s huge for me. It means I can take a bulb I bought in the US to Europe and use it there, or vice-versa. For those who travel between continents, this is a big deal, just like it was a big deal when companies started putting out 110-240V adapters for electronics. It meant I could take my laptop to Europe and use it there without a separate transformer, or I could take my cellphone along and charge it without a separate transformer.

I first heard about LED bulbs a couple of years ago, when LED christmas lights first came out. Remember that time? The lights were expensive, but given how much electricity gets consumed with festive lighting during the holiday season, switching to them was a compelling choice. As I write this, I’m looking at the LED lights in our Christmas tree, including the LED star on top (we still haven’t taken it down because it’s so nice to look at), and I realize how far we’ve come.

Given how fast LED bulbs have progressed, technologically, I think it’s safe to assume the public will also adopt them faster than CFLs as well. LED bulbs have the added advantage of having reached mass production much sooner than CFLs, and having made it to store shelves a lot sooner than CFLs. The only thing that remains is for their price to become more affordable. Market-wise, I think they’ll cannibalize the CFLs first, not the incandescents, simply because the same people who are interested in CFLs will tend to switch to LEDs now. The people who are still buying incandescents, for whatever reason, such as the requirements of their electrical installation or their price, will still continue to buy incandescents. What may hurt the sales of LED bulbs though is the fact the a lot of people have already invested heavily in CFL bulbs. My parents and I have switched almost all of the bulbs in our homes to CFLs, have already made that investment, and will likely wait until our CFL bulbs give out before we get new LEDs.

Still, when you consider that the market for lighting products continues to increase, I think we’ll see increasing levels of LED bulb adoption, starting as early as this year.

Updated 12/10/10: According to this article from Care2, Sylvania and Philips have already begun selling more affordable LED light bulbs, at $20/bulb for about 60 watts of light output.

LED and CFL bulbs are available for purchase from Amazon.

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Thoughts

Better media width compatibility in WordPress

One thing that works against you when you want to try out new WordPress themes (and this applies for either self-hosted WP installs or for WP.com blogs) is the width of your media, like the images you upload for your blog posts. Many themes are narrower than the width you may have chosen for your images over time, and this means images will either overflow beyond the margin of the main column, crowding out the sidebar and generally making your site ugly, or be cut off, which looks a little better but still ruins the user experience.

For example, most of my posts have images posted at 640 px, 600 px or 550 px wide, and that eliminates a lot of themes for me, even though they may be very nice, because their post column is too narrow to display the images.

I have a solution to this problem.

You know how you can set the size of your photos and videos on the Media Settings page?

And did you know there’s also a media width “guideline” within each theme’s CSS settings page (at WP.com)?

That width is the maximum allowed for videos and images. My current theme, “Journalist” by Lucian Marin, allows media embeds at widths up to 720 px, which is a LOT wider than most other themes, which are still stuck at 500 px or even less, at 420 px.

All of these differences would be okay, provided the WordPress platform were to read the maximum column width of a theme and adjust the maximum image width on the fly.

In other words, instead of hard-coding the image width when they’re uploaded to a blog post, it could simply say “thumbnail”, “medium” or “large”, much like it does for the image align attributes (“left”, “center”, “none”), then figure out what the “large” size really means by looking at the theme’s width limit value.

This way, no matter what theme we may choose, images and videos will still display properly and we’d be happier. After all, they’re already doing this for video auto-embeds. As you’ll see if you look at the screenshot I’ve posted above, they say “if the width value is left blank, embeds will default to the max width of your theme.” What’s to stop them from doing the same with images?

I would also encourage Automattic, should they consider building this into a future version of WordPress, to make sure it’s backward compatible, so that no user should have to go back through all of his or her old posts and make sure all the images are set to the right width if they decide to switch themes. Perhaps they can do this with a wizard that goes through all the images and sets them to the correct width, or the new image embed code can auto-magically fix the image width for old posts.

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Thoughts

Black kitten fears hammer

So funny… this little black kitten fears a hammer head and keeps pawing it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1757803256836451754

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Thoughts

A 27 GB hard drive for $276?

While cleaning up old paperwork, I ran into a receipt from late 1999, for a WD 27.3 GB hard drive with an Ultra 66 Cable. The price for that thing was $275.94 with taxes. Nowadays, I can get a 2 TB hard drive (that’s 2,000 GB) for less than $150. How times have changed!

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Oh, the paperwork…

You can get buried in paperwork in this modern, electronic, paperless society of ours. Bank statements, tax records, property tax statements, mortgage statements, credit card statements, store receipts, business expenses, insurance records, car records, the receipt for last Tuesday’s gadget purchase that you have to keep for two years because you also got an extended care plan, the restaurant receipt from last August’s meal with a client that you have to keep for the IRS since you’re deducting it from your taxes, etc., ad nauseam.

Can’t we have it simpler? Can’t it all be truly electronic? Can’t everyone just send us email receipts and statements instead of giving us paper ones? I like the way the Apple store does it. You buy something, you have the option of getting an email receipt. They have these neat credit card swipe machines they carry with them (they’re wireless), they check you out where you are in the store, and you get an instant receipt listing your purchase. It’s beautiful! Why can’t restaurants do this too? Why can’t the vehicle emissions and inspection stations do this? Why can’t all stores do this? Why can’t all banks and credit card companies handle everything electronically? My bank (USAA) has been doing it for years, and it works beautifully. Why can’t city and county governments do this? Why can’t mortgage companies do this?

On a larger and more important scale, why don’t hospitals and insurance companies handle EVERYTHING electronically, without any paper of any sort? If you’re a doctor and you have to file claims, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, then your secretary or claims specialist does… You have paper records for everything. Everyone has electronic systems, but very few talk to each other, and paper is still the only way to transfer information. This is pathetic. Hospital information systems ought to be able to send an electronic record of a patient consultation filed by a doctor to that doctor’s medical records system, which in turn ought to be able to process that information and send it to insurance companies electronically, who in turn ought to be able to process that claim and send an electronic notification to the doctor’s medical records system to update the claim status, then issue an electronic funds transfer to that doctor’s bank account. There should be no paper involved whatsoever, but those of us who deal with this stuff know it’s a far cry from it.

If there’s overpopulation, and we’ve got dwindling resources, and forests are being cut down at alarming rates all over the world, why do we have this constant avalanche of paper rolling toward us every month of the year, burying us under? If you’ve got multiple credit cards and bank accounts, a mortgage, a couple of cars, and a business on the side — and it’s your misfortune that the business is a medical one — you’re likely suffocating under paperwork. It’s nuts.

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