Re: LED's

[Wallace White <wallace@remdesign.com>]

The reason that LED's effective efficiency is so much greater than
incandescents for tail lights and such is that they emit nearly
monochromatic light. So if you want a red tail light, you just use a red
LED, instead of an incandescent light bulb and a red filter that throws
away most of the light. For the same reason, it's unlikely that we'll
see LED back-up lights, besides the fact that white LED's are rare and
expensive right now; LED's are more efficient (visible light per input
energy) than incandescents only at pretty low power. LED headlights
would be nowhere close to HID lighting, nor conventional halogen lights,
if I remember the numbers correctly.

Regarding the ice issue (which I never would've thought of here in
CA--good point), maybe you could build a tail light cluster that has
some IR LED's thrown in to the array, just to use as heat lamps, and
have your tail light lens be IR blocking. That way you'd be putting heat
on the lens, which might even do a better (more efficient) job of
melting ice than having an incandescent bulb that has to heat everything
up to heat the lens.

But maybe not!

- Wallace
  '87 5kcstq 150k, LED advocate

Bob Davis wrote:
> 
> LED's are cool - they require a lot less power to generate light, and they
> practically never burn out.
> 
> One thing to note though - for those of us in living in colder climates.
> They have such a high light/power ratio because they don't waste energy on
> heat.  They are very cool.
> 
> If you think you have troubles keeping your current incandescent lights
> clear of ice and snow, you'll hate LED's.
> 
> Bob Davis
> bob@segNET.COM
> 
> http://www.segNET.COM

--

 Wallace White                             wallace@remdesign.com
 REM Design                                     tel 415.621.3922
 290 Division St., Suite 401                    fax 415.621.4024
 San Francisco, CA  94103                      www.remdesign.com