What exactly is LED?

LED is considered very common and natural at this time, but what exactly is LED? LED has been around for a long time and we come across it in many applications. Think for example of the lights that serve as indicators in audio and video equipment, the lights of your TV in standby mode, the lights of your digital alarm clock or the third brake light of your car. In this time, LED has already become indispensable in applications both at home and in the office. LED has the future in this and the government is also promoted from the environmentally-conscious aspects, as you can see in my previously published articles " energy label c offices mandatory in 2023 " and " LED and subsidy - what exactly is this about ". To dive in a little further, this LED for dummies follows.

LED stands for Light Emitting Diode or light-emitting diode. A diode must be seen as an electronic component (semiconductor), which conducts the current in only one direction and which automatically gives light when the current is sent in the right direction, namely from the anode to the cathode or from the “minus” to the "plus". If the current is sent in the other direction, so if the LED is connected incorrectly, the diode will not light. An LED is only between 2 and 5 mm in size and in combination with multiple LEDs they can emit a lot of light. The material from which the LED is constructed in combination with the amount of voltage that passes through the diode determines the color of the light. Nowadays all LED colors can be made possible, including daylight.

The best-known features of LED are service life. the economy and environmental friendliness. The trick is, of course, to generate as much light as possible with as little wastage as possible. The service life is largely dependent on heat. How hot is the LED and how is this heat dissipated. The only thing that gets really hot with LED is the driver (former transformer) and that is the reason that we only use external drivers with our LED lighting so that these cannot affect the lifespan. People often complain that, for example, the built-in LED spots or the LED tubes break down after a year and therefore do not achieve the promised lifetime. This has everything to do with that warmth. Here too, an internal driver is often used, this is locked in the lamp and therefore cannot lose its heat.

Another misconception that I often hear during my visit to customers is: "Why can a 60W incandescent lamp be returned to an LED lamp of, for example, 6W and why can you then bring my 82W fluorescent fixture back to (but) 23W?". The answer to this is that this only has to do with the efficiency of a lamp. The wattage of a lamp does not automatically mean how much light it gives. Obviously, if you compare a light bulb with a light bulb, but not in the comparison to LED. An incandescent lamp converts on average only 5% of energy consumption into the light and converts the rest into heat. A fluorescent tube has a much higher efficiency of 65%. The current LED converts no less than 95% of its energy consumption into the light and then wins on the basis of the efficiency of all types of light sources!

Finally, the government encourages the switch to LED for environmentally friendly reasons through the EIA. See my previously mentioned article for this. Saving on the energy of 70% on energy automatically means a saving of 70% on CO2 emissions and that makes the LED lighting the most environmentally friendly lighting.