Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
Originally Posted By: ironman_gq
Originally Posted By: mjoekingz28
I notice the heat is not in the bulb glass with LEDs, but in the base. I guess there is a lot of circuitry going on in there. Same way with CFLs, although their glass was hotter than LEDs, the base where the 'magic' happens takes on alot of heat.
I wonder if there will be an improvement or successor to these current bulbs that will allow less heat.
The gas station got new LEDs not long ago and they looked great at night. About a year later, you can see a few arent lighting up anymore. It is like a two foot by two foot square of many little LEDs and one here and one there are failing to illuminate.
The heat is from the driver in the base and hopefully some heatsink material pulling heat from the diodes. The CFL bulbs have similar circuitry in the base but the bulb gets hot because of the charged gas in there dissipating heat through the glass. If you were to pop the "bulb" off of an LED light the individual diodes would also be quite warm. The bulb of an LED is just a diffuser for the light, the actual light is an array of individual diodes.
Is a diode like a laser? Back in the late nineties I got in trouble at school for shining the red laser at someone's eye in Technology Discovery class.
A diode is a semiconductor device that primarily conducts in one direction. Most handheld laser pointers use diode-based lasers. LEDs are diodes that produce light.
All of these devices produce heat to some extent. The idea is to get light energy out of an LED, and it's not going to be 100% efficient in extracting light from the energy that goes into it. It's going to produce waste heat that needs to be removed. If you're looking to make it really bright, it's going to produce more heat as a result. Incandescents produce even more heat for a given light output (remember the old Easy Bake Oven?) but they use materials that can take extreme heat like glass, tungsten, and other metals. The heat would still be released to the ambient air, but it didn't need a heat sink to keep it from disintegrating.
An LED has all that circuitry in packages that will break down if it gets too hot. However, a better, more efficient control system can make it more efficient with need for a smaller heat sink.