LEDs and MEDs

LED redundancy

Ted — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:50:16 +0000

So I was talking in my last post about how LED flashlights have a sort of built in redundancy. With regular flashlights, you usually only get the one bulb. So if that bulb dies on you, then you’re out of luck. With LED flashlights, however, you usually have more than one light source. My flashlight comes with 3. So maybe one of these might fail, but really, what are the chances that two of them will fail at the same time? Or that all three will decide to kick the bucket all at once. So at least if you have one or two remaining working LEDs then you’ll still have some light at your disposal. Maybe not full strength light, but maybe enough for your needs.

And hey, if you need light for an emergency then that one or two bulbs worth of brightness just may be enough to get you out of your scrape. Again, I just really like the idea of this redundancy which you can pretty much find in most if not all LED flashlights.

LED lifespan

Ted — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:49:39 +0000

I think I read somewhere that LEDs have a much longer lifespan than regular bulbs. My experience seems to bear that out, but of course, we’ll see what happens over the coming years. Thing is, my flashlight wasn’t all that expensive to begin with anyway, so if the time comes that the bulbs start to fade, I can always just hand it over to someone else who can find a way to make some use of it, while I buy myself a replacement LED flashlight. But then again, if these LEDs do last quite a long time, who knows? They might even outlast me. Lol.

Another thing I like about the LEDs in my flashlight is that there’re 3 of them. I like that because it means that there’s some redundancy built in. For example, if I had one of my old regular bulb flashlights, if that bulb began to fail, or failed completely, then I’d have zero light.

LED replacement

Ted — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:48:38 +0000

My LED flashlight on the other hand, hasn’t needed a bulb replaced at all in all the time I’ve owned it. And I’m not experiencing any decrease in the amount of light I’m getting from it either, even after all this time. There’s no flickering. There’s no sudden cutting out of light, or fading. It still’s pretty much as bright as when I first bought it, which I think is great.

It’s probably for the best that none of the bulbs need replacing because for the life of me, I wouldn’t know how to do it, or if it’s even possible. The old flashlights were pretty straightforward. You just unscrew the top portion. You probably unscrew the bulb. Then you screw on the replacement, and replace the top portion, and you’re done. With my LED flashlight, I’m not sure I’d even know how to access its internal workings. Hopefully, I won’t have to.

3 LEDs

Ted — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:47:51 +0000

So my flashlight has 3 LEDs. Cool. Again, these are white LEDs and together they emit a pretty decent amount of light, quite enough for my day to day needs. What I like about these LEDs is that they seem to require less energy to power them, so my flashlight isn’t like some of the previous ones I owned where I needed quite a lot of rather large batteries popped into the compartment, just so that I could have illumination which really is pretty much just comparable with what I’m getting now.

Also, I haven’t yet experienced having even one of these LEDs conk out on me. Which I think is great. In the past, with my usual flashlights, every once in a while, a bulb would go out and I’d have to decide whether to replace it or just get another flashlight. Usually, I’d just replace the entire thing.

LEDs

Ted — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:39:53 +0000

I really like the fact that LEDs are penetrating more and more into the different products that we use everyday. I think I can remember that way back when, I would only see LEDs as the red indicator lights on various devices. Not at all as a form of illumination, but really only there to indicate if something was on or off, or needed attention. Or maybe I’d see the occasional LED in a toy. They really weren’t being used for lighting at all. But of course, that’s now changed quite a bit, which I think is great.

For example, where before, my flashlights used to make use of normal bulbs (by normal, I’m thinking about those rather large bulbs, with a sometimes yellowish sort of tint), now, the flashlight I make use of contains what appear to be 3 white LEDs. And really, I have no problem with the level of illumination they offer.