Wanted: An LED Lamp That Could Outlast You October 07 2011

LEDs are the best lightbulbs to meet the demands of an environmentally enlightened future, but they’ve got a dirty little secret: They aren’t always as efficient as advertised. One of the biggest problems is that they overheat, which chisels away at the bulbs’ life span. According to data from the Lighting Research Center, an LED at 45 degrees Celsius might last for about 100,000 hours, whereas an LED at 85 degrees Celsius might deteriorate in as few as 10,000 hours.

British industrial design studio Jake Dyson Products believes it has invented a way to extend LEDs’ longevity by tapping technology originally developed for satellites (now commonly used to cool microprocessors). Shaped like a construction crane, the CSYS LED task light has a pipe in the horizontal arm that conducts warmth away from the LEDs (at the arm’s tip) and discharges heat evenly over the rest of the arm. That keeps the light source cool enough to last 160,000 hours, or 12 hours a day for about 37 years, according to the studio’s calculations. As they tell it: "The chances are the LEDs will last longer than you do!"

The CSYS LED task light debuted at Designjunction during the London Design Festival late last month. It’ll be available in the United States in May for approximately $925.