Hat tip to Manufacturing.net for this news item. According to General Electric, the compact fluorescent bulb or CFL will go out of production this year for the US market. GE will focus on LED technology.

The decision was based on the decreasing cost of LED technology that makes LEDs cost competitive with CFLs. CFLs briefly had 30 percent of the residential lighting market but they were never loved by the public thanks to the relatively long warmup time and perception that they pose health risks due to mercury. As a consequence, CFL sales were only 15 percent of bulb sales last year.

LEDs, on the other hand, are very efficient since, rather than using a heated filament, as in Edison’s original design, they use atomic-level energy transitions to make pure light with very little wasted heat compared to competing technologies.

Moreover, LED technology keeps improving with a doubling of output per electrical watt of input approximately every 36 months, according to Wikipedia.org.

That same article gives the approximate efficiency of different lighting solutions. Traditional incandescent bulbs produce 15 lumens of light per watt of electrical input, written as 15 lm/W. Fluorescents emit up to 100 lm/W. But the typical white LED produces light in the range over 100 lm/W with some recent models creating 300 lm/W.

We, at Avatar, work with lighting engineers to create cost-effective and properly designed upgrades for your lighting systems.