170 lumens per watt light bulb made a reality by Cree

By Jake Adams on Aug 01, 2012

There once was a time when lighting industry experts hoped that one day we would get LED-powered light bulbs with an efficiency of 100 lumens per watt, that was the hoop dream. Following on their bleeding edge 152 lumen per watt lamp from last year, Cree has upped the ante once again with a new light bulb that bests it with 170 lumen per watt!

Now you may be thinking, we already have LEDs that perform up and over 160 lumens per watt but the efficiency that Cree is touting is delivering 170 lumens for every watt of power from the wall, after the driver and power losses are considered. The new 170lpw lamp uses seven watts of Cree TrueWhite technology to get a light output with a Kelvin temperature of 2800 Kelvin and a color rendition over 92. Now this particular lamp would look awful over any kind of reef tank, heck it may even be too yellow for some freshwater aquarists but this proof of concept hints at an exciting future of really efficient lamps, for our homes and our fish and corals.

For now aquarium LED lighting manufacturers are focused with making good looking fixtures and spotlights with a balance of performance and value, with a degree of controllability and sometimes with a thunderstorm mode thrown in for good measure. However, it’s only a matter of time before “lumens per watt” becomes an industry standard at which point the arms race to build the most efficient aquarium LED light will be on, like a branching green frog spawn. [Cree]

Clive Bentley

You know me. I live seeing the technology pushed farther and farther. 170lm/W is fantastic no matter how you slice it.

I don’t see lm/W as a valid measurement in our little corner of the world. The spectral balance and color temperatures we use just aren’t well suited to lumen measurements, especially when you consider that any LED under 460nm, and over 660nm is measured in mW, not lumens. Do I have a better solution? Not right now. I just feel that lumen isn’t the best unit to represent the light that we use, much like lux and footcandles.
Mike

Agreed Clive, IIRC Cree has some good green technology which really skews the results of their lm/w measurements, but hey more is better!

I wonder how much this light bulb costs, as it stands LED bulbs are not much more efficient than CFLs and will never pay themselves off, hope this isn’t another case of a $50 light bulb and they compare against archaic technology to show how much money you’ll save.
Clive Bentley

I don’t think the results are skewed here. Unlike some of their lab claims, reporting some seriously nutty lumen numbers, this is in a real product, tested by an independent lab. They went to great lengths optimizing every last part of the lamp to eek out as much light as possible for as little energy as they could get away with.

Certain contests like the L-Prize should help reduce the cost to consumers. Part of the award to Philips for their bulb was to have utility subsidies to bring the price down to $20-$25, but that hasn’t happened yet, at least nation wide. While current efficiencies aren’t much better than CFL (this one is a fair bit better though), the low hazardous material content, better dimming performance, longer life, and the lack of high frequency EMF are bonuses over CFL.
CaliReefer

Curious how you come to the conclusion that LEDs are almost the same efficiency as CFLs? From my testing, they are almost 75% more efficient in terms of power consumption. I have spent the last 4 years testing CFLs to LEDs in search for the best possible lighting using the least about of electricity to properly grow algae. My 28w of LEDs out performs CFLs by a factor of 4 when compared to 4x 26w CFLs over the same area in terms of algae growth. Up front costs is obviously higher on LEDs right now (I paid $1.70ea per LED + $10 for a driver), much more so on these “home bulbs”, but my DIY 14 LED light to grow algae cost me a whopping $34 and were “paid off” in under 2 months from power savings when compared to the CFLs and 3 years later I haven’t had to replace a single LED, where as if I were using CFLs I would have to replace them every 3 months.
Clive Bentley

When dealing with household lamps and household applications, LED lamps and CFLs are about on par. With the exception of the Philips L-Prize lamp (10W), most LED lamps that are designed to replace a 60W incandescent draw about 12W. An equivalent CFL is 13W.

You don’t mention whether you are using white LEDs (and at what color temperature), or a combination of red and blue LEDs in your turf-scrubber. Even white LEDs at 6500K will give you an advantage over CFLs due to the spectral distribution. If you are using discrete red and blue LEDs, then you are going to be way ahead of any CFL.
Blair Mrachek

Excellent. Although it won’t be great for our reefs as-is, the consumer demand for cleaner, greener, more efficient general lighting and the big-name companies pushing their R&D departments to meet that demand can only help.

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