Tomorrow’s Hottest Technology – Coming To A Kitchen Near You

Posted on April 22, 2010 | Category: Kitchen Trivia

So what is it then? The latest in laser powered kitchen knives (not on sale in any shops folks) or a cyclonic food blender? Err, no, rather boringly perhaps its lighting. Let me explain…

Some years ago a global plan to eliminate all incandescent light bulbs was cooked up and agreed to by most governments. The reason was that traditional light bulbs are utterly woeful at energy efficiency, or put another way, spectacularly wasteful of electricity. In a world where adding heat and pollution to the atmosphere are as taboo as squandering remaining oil reserves, the humble light bulb represents the mother of all double whammies since it converts ninety percent of its input energy into waste heat.

So goodbye and good riddance; the total worldwide energy savings will be colossal. There’s just the small problem of what to do now when the sun goes down? Well we’ve had so-called “energy saving” light bulbs in form of CFLs for a few years now, but they’re not actually all that much better (maybe 4 times less wasteful) and they really don’t perform very well and did I mention the mercury vapor?

But creeping up quietly has been LED technology. You know, the kind of thing you find in Christmas lights, pocket torches, instrument displays and toys. Hardly capable of replacing your now banned incandescent light bulbs let alone a contender for “tomorrow’s hottest technology” surely?

But the interesting thing about LEDs is that they’re solid state electronic devices and anyone who knows anything about electronics knows that Moore’s Law predicts their rate of development is exponential – they double in power every eighteen months. And LEDs follow the unsurprisingly similar Haitz’s Law that predicts much the same.

If yesterday’s feeble 1w LED was about on a par with a 10w night-light, then in six years times a 1w LED will be able to deliver light equivalent to an incandescent bulb rated at 160w. Now you get it? This kind of technological development is simply unstoppable and will trample all before it, no different to how digital cameras rapidly and completely swept away decades of technology based on photographic film.

So what’s the deal with the kitchen? Well, among the worst offenders in a domestic setting for wasting energy (and thus also money) are kitchen lights. Mainly because there tend to be quite a lot of them and, with the contemporary trend to view the kitchen as the heart of the home, they are left switched on a lot of the time. And if like many people you have mains powered halogen spotlights all over your kitchen ceiling, you can fast forward to the bright new future right now by very simply replacing them with GU10 LED bulbs (and save yourself a packet too).

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