Household Flourescent Lights Finally Catch Up With Commercial Lighting

Posted on 26. May, 2010 by Ross in New Technologies

Commercial light fittings which use energy-saving fluorescent lighting, such as the intelligent Somar Eluma warehouse lighting system, have been offering businesses massive savings on their lighting bills for years now, through combinations of efficient lamps, high-quality reflectors, occupancy sensing and daylight harvesting. Until now, however, household compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) have struggled to afford the same energy-saving opportunities as their more industrial brethren.

A recent innovation from NXP Semiconductors is set to change all that. The company, an offshoot of Phillips which provides chip sets for lighting products, has developed a new chip which allows much deeper dimming of CFL bulbs than they are currently able to achieve. On top of that, the NXP lights will run 5% more efficient than lights without the new chip.

Currently, state-of-the-art CFL bulbs can only dim down to around 20% of their maximum output. The new NXP chip allows CFL bulbs to dim down below 10%, as well as producing faster initial lighting times.

Why is that important? Businesses with energy-efficient lighting controlled by intelligent sensors react to changes in the ambient light, lower the light output as the amount of daylight increases. Household CFLs with the NXP chip could behave similarly, leading to even greater energy savings.

Increases in the efficiency of CFL bulbs will be extremely worrying to the emerging LED lighting market, which will be struggling to entire customers to pay 10-20 times more than a CFL for comparable energy savings and performance. Much of the sales and marketing of the prowess of LED lighting revolves around savings across the bulb’s lifetime when compared to traditional incandescents, encouraging them to now enter the market with lights costing around $50, but the numbers fail to stack up against CFLs. The price will have to come down drastically before LED lighting has a hope of becoming competitive, whilst in the interim the banning of incandescents across the world is opening the market up for fluorescent lighting.

If LED lighting has a hope of overhauling CFL bulbs in the long run, it must rely on maintaining its sexier, over-hyped green image as long as possible without the darker side of LEDs tarnishing its marketing gloss, capitalising on apathy towards CFL bulbs. The LED lighting market can’t afford any PR issues, though, else fluorescent lighting will dominate lighting for as long as incandescents did before it.