LED Stocks Set to Light Up the Sector

It's been an icon of the modern household since Thomas Edison invented it over 130 years ago...

Our most famous inventor's most famous invention is, of course, the incandescent light bulb.

But you may be surprised by just how much you didn't know about what is perhaps the most familiar single object in your entire house.

Here are just a few of these facts that may change the way you think about the way you illuminate your home...

1.) Producing light isn't what the light-bulb does best. You may have never thought about this, but we've all been burned at least once or twice by touching a glowing light bulb. The reason for this annoying, sometimes dangerous heat is that incandescent light bulbs aren't very efficient.

In fact as little as 1 watt out of every 50 that you put in contributes to actual light. The rest are lost to — you guessed it — background heat. (A tungsten filament must be heated to between 3,000 and 5,000 degrees F to get it to glow). Now, what can be dangerous to your fingertips or lampshades is even more costly to your power bill...


2.) They could power 2 cities the size of New York for free — if we did away with them. By recent estimates, households and businesses in the United States lose about $18 billion every year to inefficiencies in lighting. In terms of power, that's enough to light up a city twice the size of New York for a whole year.

You think maybe Edison was considering these things when he was working on the magical glowing light bulb filament? It was his company, after all, that was also supplying the power that made them glow... Makes you wonder...


3.) Producing light isn't what the light bulb does second best, either: Another thing that incandescents are known for, besides the radiant heat, is their lifespan. Glowing for an average of about 1000 hours before burning out gives most light bulbs a practical life expectancy of around 1 year. By comparison, alternative light sources arriving on the commercial scene right now can outlast incandescents by between 10 and 50 times.

This short life span is also a built-in benefit for the light bulb companies. Bulbs that burn out once a year are replaced at a rate of 650 million per year in the U.S. alone. That's close to $2 billion in household spending directly attributed to incandescent inefficiency.


4.) Replacing the light bulb hasn't been easy. In reality, this modern household icon has been on the way out for decades, but the transition hasn't been easy... Offices stopped using incandescents as their primary source of light back in the 1950s; today, the bulb's apparent replacement (the fluorescent tube) has emerged as a major culprit in the battle for the environment.

You see, with mercury being a key ingredient in the millions of fluorescent tubes we use at work every day, disposal is turning into an industrial nightmare. Today, the costs of cleanup — not to mention other shortcomings in the technology — have caused many businesses to start turning their backs on the once revered florescent.

5.) Buying light bulbs usually means sending money overseas. And not just to any ol' place overseas... but directly to our biggest economic competitor: China.

As with many things cheap and mass-produced, the Chinese have taken on the light bulb — and excelled. Today, the Middle Kingdom produces more light bulbs than any other nation in the world. And, with Western economies moving away from cheap manufacturing, Chinese market share is expected only to expand.

Hope did not die with the fluorescent alternative...

As you see, this one-time household icon — the object that even became the symbol of the "bright idea" — is currently one of the biggest single drains on our economy... and on our power grids.

Hope, however, did not die with the fluorescent alternative...

Because right now, there is an unprecedented push to make another light source the preferred commercial lighting solution of the 21st century.

It's so effective, in fact, that grocery stores are already using it in their refrigerated display cases because it produces almost no background heat at all.

And it's so efficient that it needs just 9 watts of power to produce the same amount of light as a 100 watt Edison bulb.

To find out the which technology is on the minds of everyone from Wal-Mart Execs to Department of Defense administrators, keep your eye out for my full report, due out next week.

To your wealth,

Brian Hicks

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