What Zhaga is trying to achieve is very good for us consumers but their approach is wrong. We really do need to be able to prolong the life of a LED fixture beyond the life of the LED.
I don't think LED's themselves will ever be light bulb, HID module, nor floro-cheap for quite some time - the cost of the LED's themselves will continue to be a sizable percentage of the fixture costs.
- For residential lighting, a lighting fixture can have a useful life of decades or even centuries as i embodies an era in our history. There are plenty of homes that furbished in the style of early 1900s or 1960s and so on. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years or something people will want to have a home in the early 21st century style and that implies lighting fixtures too. But wait, you wont be able to use these fixtures as their light sources do not function anymore and they cannot be replaced...
That's like worrying about the plight of film photographers now that digital has taken over. Their hobby was more affordable before digital
because everyone else was (grudgingly) subsidizing them. Once the market went digital only the diehards stuck with it, and with volumes down they're paying more. Eventually the capital cost of new digital equipment will be more appealing than the spiraling operational costs of buying and processing film.
For every
centerpeice lighting fixture that's worth something aesthetically, there are a dozen cheap builder-grade fixtures with approximately zero aesthetic or sentimental value. Think fixtures in closest, hallways, utility rooms, garages, spare bedrooms, secondary bathrooms, etc ... their sole function is to provide light, reliably.
In fifty or 100 years if you want to decorate your house in the style of the late 20th century, you will either need to visit antique stores for the real deal or turn to specialty manufacturers for something appropriately retro... and expect to cough up a small fortune for either. I have no real interest in ensuring that such fixtures are affordable to obtain and operate in the future. CFL's and LED bulbs will be around for numerous decades to serve the existing fixture stock; much longer than that and attrition will take over.
- For commercial and business lighting a lifetime of 25.000 hours can mean only 2-3 years of operation. It is not a sound business practice to replace hole fixtures because the LEDs do not function anymore or are too dim, especially considering the cost of the LEDs can be only a fraction of the cost of the fixture.
All the commercial LED fixture manufacturers I'm seeing are promising appreciably more than 25k hours. Only thing I see that claim on are LED bulbs, which live in decidedly poor environments. Given that a number of 24-hour operations around me have switched to LED lighting, I will be watching their maintenance patterns closely.
Yes, the trend in industry towards treating everything as a sealed assembly is maddening. The reduction in manufacturing cost is paid by the unfortunate consumer/operator that has to deal with a component failure that cannot be satisfactorily diagnosed nor repaired short of specialized, warranty-voiding labor and unsupported replacement parts.
With the interest on high temperatures in binning for the newest LED models from the major manufacturers, increasing environmental ruggedness, and even new die fabrication techniques that seem to be addressing some of the shortcomings of present LED tech, I expect manufacturers to start hitting 100k+ hours easily in a few years - especially with active thermal management. That would be whole-fixture replacement at more than a decade interval.
For commercial/industrial applications, some ability to replace wear components (LED's, driving circuitry, active thermal management) will be a selling point... but I don't expect said interchangability to be as ubiquitous as the A19 bulb nor the 48" T8 floro. I suspect it will be more like automobile parts - the OEM will support their wares so long as it's profitable with lower-overhead third-party aftermarket manufacturers at the fringes supporting smaller-volume parts where they can make a profit. Each manufacturer will have a variety of "platforms" with variable degrees of interchangeability between models within a "platform".
Once the fixtures can comfortably reach 100k hours - largely achieved by superior efficiency and declining unit costs that allow much gentler driving for similar "lumens per dollar" - I'm not sure that the residential sector will need the modularity. I see 3-4 hours a day listed as a common metric for light bulbs when determining lifespan. If we extend that to 8 hours a day, a 100k hour operating lifespan would realize about 34 years of operation - longer than is typically realized for numerous other hard-wired / permanently-installed household equipment such as climate control and water heaters.
LEDs where trying to take on the neon in T8 or T5 fixtures in the wrong way. The LED tube has been around for years but did not really gain any ground as you cannot really make a tube filled with electronics and metals as cheap as a glass one filled with gasses. Now the approach has changed as i have seen at the fair. T6 or T8 tubes are to be replaced with modules as they ones here (Philips Fortimo):
http://www.lighting.philips.co.uk/su...es-systems.wpd
or even strips:
http://www.ledrise.com/led-lighting-...wer-led-strip/
LED strips are nothing new and seem to largely be the domain of sign companies replacing neon or doing custom outdoor lighting for retail customers. Or hobbyists such as myself that can't be bothered with too much fabrication for less aesthetically-demanding applications.
The Philips offering seems to be a semi-transitional offering available to other lighting manufacturers so as to minimize their R&D costs on fixture design since their strip fits within the general footprint of standardized linear floro systems. Namely, "chunk this strip/heat spreader/driver into your existing footprint then figure out optics and thermal management." Suspect that would make fixture manufacturers somewhat uneasy, much like Intel's foray into motherboards more than a decade ago was initially upsetting to the PC OEM's at the time.