LED Bulbs Soon to Be As Affordable As CFLs

We're pretty much incandescent bulb free in our household (we have one small 20 watt bulb inside a Tom Dixon Jack Floor lamp and one 30 watt chandelier bulb installed in a decorative overhead lamp for sizing purposes), and overall think CFL's are a no brainer if you know how to choose the correct colour temperature so you don't feel like you've moved to a high rise Hong Kong tenement building. But the real lighting tech we'd love to move over to is LED lights, which light up your life an average of 100,000 hours before they need replacing, which is 10x as long as fluorescent lamps and 130x longer than your traditional bulb. No warm up and instant on too. So why not now? Price. WE love the Geobulb LED lightbulb...but not the $120 price. But University of Cambridge materials scientists have discovered techniques in manufacturing which might result in to LED designs at the same price as CFLs...

The problem with LED bulbs till now is the gallium nitride used in its manufacturing is highly susceptible to cracking due to the required high heat. New Scientist online reports Colin Humphreys's team at the University of Cambridge solution was to circumvent shrinkage-cracking problems with incorporating aluminium gallium nitride in their LED design, allowing for the LEDs to be "grown" on silicon like most every other common electronic component, thus bringing costs down to a fraction of what the previous system resulted in. How soon will we see Home Depot LED bulbs at a modest price? Still a bit of a wait at 5 years, but a whole lot closer than once thought before. The future does indeed look brighter than before.