What's should we be looking at LED lighting product for quality?
* Color Temperature and Color Rendering Index (Quality of light)
Like CFL/Fluorescent light, LED light is not a full
spectrum light (vs incandescent light). Early LED light products usually look
bluish at around 6500K, for its high lumen efficacy number. Recent years there
are more day light white (5500K) and warm white (below 3000K) products which
are more suitable to human visible range.
Color Rendering Index (CRI) is the number in percentage to
measure how good the ability of light to bring out true color of objects,
Incandescent light bulb is highest as 100. Usually you want the number to be
greater than 70 for most applications, professional who works with color would
require 90 or higher CRI.
* Heat Handling (Quality for product life time)
Almost all electronic parts emits some
heat, that is especially true for LED products. Lighting grade LED converts
about less than 33% of energy into light; the rest would become heat. Driver
does better that has only less than 20% of energy become heat. The number is
better than traditional light source such as incandescent, fluorescent or HID.
However, traditional light sources work at much higher temperature above 400F(200C)
or higher; on this end, electronic parts usually won't be able to sustain more
than 250F(120C). That's why LED lighting is more sensitive to heat. Heat can
damage LED, shorten their life span, decrease light output and ruin their CRI. Similar effect applies to driver, too.
Thermo design is big topic in LED
lighting since beginning. It's complicated and no fixed rule for user to exam
products. One general rule is metal conduct heat better than most of other materials;
the other rule is size counts. lots of heat trap in a small space isn't a good
thing.
* Energy efficiency
There are some room of difference
in energy conversion rate among various LED products. Since lumen is measured
as energy, blue light has higher lumen number than other light. LED working
temperature also plays a role, too. Cooler LED does better work to convert
electricity into light. Of course, circuit efficiency made few difference, too.
All these variance doesn't compare
to difference made by basic lamp design. LED by nature is directional light
source, while all other light source is omnidirectional. Use LED to make a omnidirectional
lamp requires mounting LED at different directions. On the other hand, use other light sources to
make a directional lamp, such as ceiling light/Wall light/ shop light, usually
include reflective panel to reflect light to desired direction. But no matter
how it does, there is no match to directional lamp that uses LED. in some
cases, directional LED lamps use only half of energy as fluorescent ones.
Easy LED Lighting quality
Our LED module uses aluminum plate as mounting bracket, which also makes
direct contact with the belly of all LEDs. The aluminum takes heat away from LED and
allow them to work at much cooler temperature.
Our LED kit or lamp uses external driver that has much durable design. It's
water and dust proof and doesn't have to be crumble together LED heat source.
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