Kickstarter project team claims its LED bulb world's most efficient

(Phys.org)—Entrepreneurs Christian Yan, Tom Rodinger and Gimmy Chu have formed a partnership and created a company they call NanoLight. Their products are LED light bulbs that the group claims are the world's most efficient. They are currently looking for backing on Kickstarter, the crowd funding site.

As most everyone is aware, traditional incandescent light bulbs are on their way out – they waste far too much energy. Instead, consumers have been urged to purchase Compact Florescent Lamps (CFLs), a smaller variant of the long thin light bulbs used in commercial buildings. Unfortunately, thus far, consumers have been less than impressed with the bulbs, both with the quality of the light they emit and the time lag between when they are turned on and when they achieve their maximum brightness. Because of that, research efforts have blossomed aimed at coming up with a new kind of bulb that can offer light quality as good as the old, but with far better efficiency. Most of that research has been focused on LED bulbs, which are now available to consumers, but at high cost and with ungainly metal heat sinks.

The trio at NanoLight have come up with a unique way to deal with the heat that is produced when using strong LED's, they've physically connected them to small circuit boards which dissipate the heat. The circuit boards are then cut to fit together, like a 3D jigsaw puzzle, to form a rough facsimile of an incandescent light bulb. Using this design, the team is offering three different types of bulbs.

The first is listed as using 10 watts of power to produce what they say is the equivalent light output of a 75 watt incandescent bulb. The second consumes 12 watts and is claimed to produce the same light output as a 100 watt incandescent light bulb. The third option is apparently the same as the second except it produces more light. Because of heat sink issues, most large makers of LED bulbs aren't offering bulbs that are supposed to be comparable to a 100 watt incandescent bulb, which might be a good selling point for the bulbs from NanoLight. Another selling point is the arrangement of the LEDs on the bulb – they allow for throwing light all over a room instead of in just one direction, as is the case with most current commercial options.

The team has received pledges far in excess of their goal, so it looks like these new bulbs will soon make their way into homes where they will no doubt prove, or disprove the claims of their makers.