PhotonWrangler
Flashaholic
Only 70 times more expensive than a fluorescent bulb! Swiiiiinnng and a miss...
So you've potentially got those huge hot inefficient ballasts boosting the voltage up and current regulating for a hot gas arc...
Actually considering the losses where 50% of the tube's light has to reflect off the white fixture to make it into the room, LEDs can probably compete but not in any wide-margin victory. Fluorescent lights don't exactly take a lot of $$ to run so what does a few % of efficiency matter one way or another?
There are fluorescent ballasts that can dim, though rare, I was recently in a place using 5000K T8 tubes with dimmers (a fairly unusual combination for sure). Therefore the fact that the LEDs can be dimmed is not a distinctive feature, although to some extent there may be an improvement in efficiencyNot having to replace them has real benefits. They can also be dimmed, except I doubt you can dim them in this configuration with that ballast in the way. You're not even supposed to install a dimmer going to any fluorescent fixture at all. Still, these are going to have to be way cheaper to be of any practical value.
as the LEDs are underdriven, I don't think that will be a very significant difference though.
IMO the biggest advantage here is not to replace the tubes (then be stuck with an unsightly, and unnecessary reflector), there should be dedicated LED fixtures that take advantage of that fact. The fact that LED light can be more efficiently directed means that quality of lighting could potentially be much better (ie more diffused lighting, and elimination of direct line-of-sight to the light source)Actually considering the losses where 50% of the tube's light has to reflect off the white fixture to make it into the room, LEDs can probably compete but not in any wide-margin victory. Fluorescent lights don't exactly take a lot of $$ to run so what does a few % of efficiency matter one way or another?
As far as I'm aware, LED lighting products powered by mains (110 to 240 volts AC 50 to 60Hz) are as-of-yet undimmable, unless a special dimming circuit made for that specific lamp is used.
The reason is that common "household" dimmers alter the AC waveform in a manner that LED bulbs do not like.[/i][/b]
I have tried some of those CFLs, and the only problem there is that the entire interface is very kludgy feeling -- for example, different fluoresecnt bulbs would "sense" the setting in the dimmer setting at different rates, and you would get funky effects where some bulbs would dim more than others, and where there would actually be observable lag in the process of diming as well, one would actually cycle off and on intermittently. The other problem was that unlike the T8 dimming ballasts I have seen, which go extremely low, the screw-in dimmable CFLs did not dim low enough. I believe this is due to the limited ability for the ballast to "cope" with the noisy output of stadard dimmers.Realistically, that is just a matter of making ballasts for LEDS that can be dimmed via a traditional dimmer similar to what has been done for compact flourescent lamps with some of them working off a traditional dimmer. It is something impossible, and probably not even difficult, it just needs to be done.