Energy-Efficient Lighting: How LED Technology Is Transforming Our Homes and Workplaces
A Blue LED Love Story
In the early 90s, I remember countless trips to Radio Shack with my dad. We were always tinkering on little hobby projects, and we’d stock up on red, yellow, and green LEDs. One day, I asked him why there were no blue LEDs for sale – blue was my favorite color, and I wanted to use it in our projects.
My dad told me that blue LED lights were available, but they were very expensive – somewhere between $10-$40 for a single blue LED, compared to just 10 cents for a red, yellow, or green one. I was disappointed; that price point was way out of reach for our hobby budget. Why were these lights so darn pricey?
My dad explained that blue light is much more energy-intensive to produce than the other colors. For a long time, red, yellow, and green LEDs were feasible to manufacture at scale, but blue LEDs were stubborn holdouts.
We had a bet on when the blue LED breakthrough might happen, after which we’d be able to buy blue LEDs for the same price as the other colors. I was excited at the prospect of an expensive LED getting cheaper, but I didn’t fully understand how higher-energy light could affect us as humans.
The Breakthrough and Its Consequences
The breakthrough for blue LEDs occurred in the early 1990s, and the process for creating affordable blue LEDs even won its inventors a Nobel Prize. This was a game-changer, as red, green, and blue LEDs are required to make white LED light. The breakthrough paved the way for an era of smaller, more portable technologies – from thin LED TV screens to the displays in laptops and mobile devices. It also allowed us to introduce energy-efficient LED bulbs into our homes and public spaces, a boon for power conservation.
In 2015, roughly 90% of all large-scale sporting venue operators that installed new lighting systems opted for LED lighting, saving teams across the United States millions of dollars in costs.
But the widespread use of high-energy visible (HEV) light, like that emitted by LEDs, may have mighty ambitions, but its ubiquity has enormous, unintended, and unforeseen consequences on human health, well-being, and culture.
The Public Costs of Blue Light
HEV light is not just in the blue light in our screens – it’s rapidly encroaching upon every aspect of our daily lives. Many cities are embracing the new energy savings of LED bulbs by swapping out warmer-spectrum street lights for high-energy LED lights. While these bulbs might require less power, they also lack the cozy, more human quality of the former lights.
And instead of being able to sleep easily at night, people in homes with bedroom windows facing these street lights get a dose of HEV at the worst time in the 24-hour cycle. This is a compounded concern for impoverished individuals who might not have the means to black out their living quarters or must work multiple jobs and cannot afford any disruption to their sleep.
In some cases, blue light is literally degrading our shared artistic heritage. As LED lighting gains prominence in art galleries and museums, our experience of viewing art is changing. Even worse, a Belgian study found that LED lights were bleaching paintings by Van Gogh and Cézanne.
Solving the Blue Light Problem
We can’t easily call for our cities to go back to a less intense light – the switch has already been made, and cash-strapped municipalities need the energy savings. But there are solutions.
We can work with companies like Plug N’ Save Energy Products and their Eyesafe technologies to add blue-light filters to everyday objects like LED lights and VR headsets. These advanced filters can remove the dangerous parts of the spectrum while maintaining the energy savings and our eyes’ health.
Although we’ve made incredible advances in how we make technologies, we still have to remember that they can exert negative human effects. Efficiency is not everything, and harming our sleep in favor of energy savings might actually end up not saving us much energy in the long run. We may end up with a population that works less efficiently, has increased issues with anxiety and exhaustion, and suffers from growing insomnia.
We must already deal with exacerbated health issues and associated costs due to Daylight Savings Time – the spread of blue light can only build on those effects. We should definitely encourage galleries and other public institutions to implement filtering solutions to preserve our eyes and our cultural heritage. For similar reasons, we should at least advocate for filtered lighting in heavily trafficked, highly communal spaces, or in special situations, revert to older, warmer illumination.
Personal Solutions to Blue Light
As previously noted, tech companies are starting to recognize the larger blue light problem, but they haven’t yet fully fixed it. Smart refrigerators have become a new culprit, as many of them boast a touchscreen with a bright blue display. Consider a small drape or other cover to put over the screen so it doesn’t blast you into insomnia whenever you go into the kitchen for a late-night glass of water.
Audit your house for blue light LEDs and screens. Chances are, your entertainment system, smart home devices, and other connected technology have blue LEDs and other bright indicators. You can cover existing indicators with tape, cloth, or 3M putty. If you’re responsible for building products, give indicators a night mode with different-colored LEDs or panels and integrate spectrum-filtering covers right into the screens themselves.
I have a beautiful air filter that emits a bright blue glow all night. Thankfully, I can turn the device to night mode, though I can never set it permanently or change the color. Eliminating this “junk sleep” is crucial.
We’re human beings – we need places to decompress, reflect, and get cozy. Homes are for relaxing and shouldn’t be a mirror of our work environments. If you don’t have access to filters, incandescents, or window shades, consider wearing blue-blocking glasses such as those produced by TrueDark to block out HEV light an hour before bedtime. These lenses have reduced my insomnia by an average of an hour a night every time I’ve worn them.
Since energy-efficient LED bulbs also tend to emit problematic levels of blue light, consider replacing them with beautiful Edison bulbs or other human-friendly bulbs that minimize blue light. The New York Times has some good recent guides on better home lighting.
I’d love to see a future where LEDs are everywhere, but filtered. Until then, we need more awareness around the problems with the blue LED that we already have. Do you have problems with bright blue light in your house? How do you solve it? I’d love to hear more about personal solutions to eye fatigue and HEV light at home, work, and during transit.