Taking out a Mortgage to Buy Led Lights for Your Home

Michael Giberson

A Financial Times article discusses advances in the application of LED technology, both for television and other display technologies and for general lighting applications.

Pete Moran of the DCM venture capital firm says LEDs have advantages such as longer life and greater efficiency compared with both incandescents and the energy-saving compact fluorescents with which consumers are currently replacing them.

“They contain no mercury, they’re inherently dimmable, the colour is more natural and you’ll put one in your house and never need to change the bulb,” he says.

In my experience compact florescent light bulbs didn’t always live as long as advertised and other bulb characteristics were less satisfactory as well: the color was sometimes less desirable and the bulbs usually not dimmable.

Like compact florescent light bulbs, LED lights have offered consumers longer-lived bulbs with lower energy costs at the cost of higher costs up front.  However, new LED lights are so long-lived (actually, projected to be so long lived) that one may be able to build new houses with all LED lights and have them last as long as a 30-year mortgage.  The higher up front cost of the lights would be factored into the cost of the home and become part of the amount borrowed, which would ease the consumer’s management of the investment cost, and the lower energy consumption over the life of the lights would help the consumer make the slightly higher house payment.

Elsewhere: Tom Konrad at Alt Energy Stocks likes LED manufacturers’ stocks, but thinks LED maker Cree, Inc. is now overpriced.

Locally (for me, anyway): Texas Tech University Nano Tech Center researchers are doing nanoscale research on LEDs, examining the limits of current LED technology in projection systems and developing ultraviolet LEDs, among other things.