Reducing your carbon footprint is one of the more beneficial things you can do for the present-day economy and atmosphere. With LED lights, you can also reduce the impact your energy bill has on your wallet. These products of modern-day technology significantly increase the light output of your light sources, all the while drastically reducing the energy required to power them.
ENERGY ADVANTAGES OF AN LED DRIVER CIRCUIT
How is this accomplished? The details involve the LED driver circuit, which is the primary component that converts a lot more of the energy you get from your outlet or power source to energy – unlike the incandescent bulb, which converts over 90% of the input energy to waste heat. The problem with the latter is that you’re paying for that energy – even though it isn’t being converted to light. In the case of the LED, you can use far less energy, since the driver circuit transmits most of the energy as light.
This happens because in an incandescent bulb, all that’s happening is electrical energy is run through a tungsten filament in an inert atmosphere of argon gas (oxygen would cause a fire or an explosion). It is by heating up this tough metal that the radiative effects provide the light you see from the bulb. However, because tungsten has such a high melting temperature – the highest of the chemical elements, in fact – most of the energy is used in heating it up to radiative fluorescence.
In an LED driver circuit, a semiconductor regulates the effect of the electrical input as the internal environment of the LED circuit changes. Since you’re dealing with electrons and not atoms of an element such as tungsten, heat does not play nearly as much of a factor during the provision of electrical energy to provide the electrons with energy. This energy excites them and the electrons emit light of a particular color as they “calm back down”. This, in effect, is what causes the light display.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT LED DRIVER
Energy Recovery Products (ERP) allows you to choose driver circuits by a range of desired attributes; you want to know them by supply voltage, output voltage and maximum switching frequency, for example. These values are instrumental in ensuring the proper compatibility for the relevant application – such as dimmable lights, integrate circuits and high power LED drivers.