What About White LEDs?

White LEDs have been making slow but steady progress, and we believe that they are now suitable for some interior lighting applications. We've been testing and building prototypes for over ten years, and they finally have reached the point where they are good enough for limited use in Alpenglow Lights. Unlike colored LEDs, the white LEDs are actually less efficient than our compact fluorescents. The currently available white LEDs produce about 30 to 50 lumens per watt, which is more than double that of incandescent bulbs, but compact fluorescent tubes produce 65 lumens per watt. The most efficient of the white LEDs are an extremely cold color that we consider unacceptable for any interior application. There are now some LEDs that are called warm, but they are still a cooler color than what we generally prefer for interior lighting. We still don't consider either the efficiency or color to be adequate for general area lighting, but for supplemental applications like reading lights, they can have some significant advantages. We now have an LED version of our reading light, which you can read more about on the Reading Light page of this web site. For general area lighting, LEDs still don't come close to our compact fluorescent overhead light. You can be confident that we will continue to use the best technology available and will be monitoring future white LED development.