Relative to other lighting technologies such as incandescent and fluorescent/CFLs, we could almost leave this page blank for LED's. That might throw some people so we'll compare one of the greatest strengths of LED lighting over other available technologies and a key factor in their savings to the owner. Maintenance and Replacement costs and effort goes way down. When we compare watt to watt and bulb to bulb costs in our "How LED Saves You Money" article, we don't even include the financial cost value of labor associated with the more frequent changing of incandescent and CFL bulbs but it's there. So let's into the maintenance and replacement requirements for LED's so we can can contrast those with other available technologies. The key term here is a little electronics 101 called Solid State. Simply defined, Solid State describes an electronic component that is made out of solid materials. An example of a transition would be the old computers than ran on vacuum tubes and today's transitors. For some reason, we're still lighting our world with 1950's technology. Incandescent and fluorescent lights are not solid state. They break, they burst, and in general, they are more fragile. Much more fragile as anyone changing a bulb knows for experience. There are more things to go wrong and invariably, breakage and failure can infect about 20% of finished incandescent bulbs. There's also the intense ability of heat to wreak havoc on any system (literally a law of physics...one of the big 4) and the small world of the light bulb is not immune to our laws of physics. On average, incandescent bulbs will last about 2000 hours. fluorescent and CFL's will last about 8000 hours although they steadily lose their ability to light (lumens) during their life. What about our LED lights? 10,000 hours? 15000 hours? Higher. In fact, you're looking at 50000 hours. There's just less to go wrong with a solid state electronic component. This factors heavily into the cost structure (and advantage) of LED's over any time period beyond 1 year. So what impact does this longer lifespan have on the business owner prescient enough to make the switch? The obvious impact is in the form of labor. You may think..."How much time does it take to screw in a lightbulb" which quickly leads to a few bad jokes. If you have 100 lights in our building not to mention 1000 lights or 20,000 lights, it starts to add up quickly. Why? Because incandescents are going to go out after about 241 days at 10 hours a day. That's only 5 minutes to switch out (assuming they're accessible) but you multiply 5 minutes by 1000 lights and now you ask the question, at $20/hour, can I find something better for skilled labor to do with their time? Yes you can. The answer is to have them put in LED lights and then forget about them for years. ZeroHedge, a snarky but informative financial website has the tagline, "On a Long Enough Timeline, the Survival Rate of Everyone Goes to Zero". That's true for all things including LED lights. So what's involved at that point? This is the genius of our particular LED lamps. When most LED lights fail, the entire light fails and needs to be replaced. We felt even that was wasteful so we built our technology around a chip or "driver" that pushes the electricity to the LED light. We consider 20% reduction in light be time for replacement but you only need to replace the driver in most cases. This approach is substantially less expensive than other LED lights where the entire lamp is replaced. The rest of the industry will be catching up with our technology for years. You will already have it today and it will start saving you today. It's good to be early. When portable luminaire lamp a driver does fail, you will send the lamp back to us, we'll switch out the driver for a new one, and send back the refurbished lamp. The cost is much less to you than to replace the entire lamp. Why throw out the computer because the software has a bug. We don't why...but 99% of business and residences do it every year at their considerable expense.
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