LED lights have become increasingly popular in recent years because of the many advantages they hold over bulb-based lights. While the initial purchase price is generally higher, a good LED light will provide superior visibility, rugged durability and unmatched longevity – ultimately providing greater value. Not all LED lights are created equal, however, so it is important to do your homework before you buy. The purpose of this post is to outline the top 10 advantages of upgrading to LED and provide you with information you can use to cut through the marketing hype and objectively evaluate different LED light options. 

TEN REASONS TO UPGRADE
YOUR LIGHTS TO LEDS

More Durable

LEDs utilise solid-state construction – meaning that there are no breakable bulbs, fragile filaments, or sensitive electrodes like those found in incandescent , halogen, or HID lighting. For this reason, LEDs are the perfect choice for vehicle applications where bumps, curves and potholes would
cause traditional lights to prematurely fail.

Less EMI

HID lights have the unfortunate tendency to produce electromagnetic interference (EMI) – causing a variety of complications for OEM and aftermarket customers alike. A properly designed LED light, on the other hand, will be much “quieter” from an EMI perspective.

Maintenance-Free

With no filaments to burn out, no bulbs to change, and no moving parts to fail, LED systems have the lowest maintenance costs of any lighting technology. Maintenance reduction is a major component of the cost effectiveness for implementing LED technology. Install an LED light and enjoy years of trouble-free visibility!

Eliminate Glare

If you’ve ever been blinded by oncoming lights, you can appreciate just how important it is to minimise glare. LED lights create clear, high-contrast light which offers excellent visibility. All of our LED lights are specifically engineered to be easy on the eyes – providing just the right amount (and colour) of light to see and be seen by others.

Reduce Your Downtime Costs

The superior operating life of LED lights means that you’ll not only save money on replacement parts and labour, but that you’ll also create drastic reductions in vehicle downtime.

If you use a vehicle for business, you understand that downtime has real financial costs. Every hour your vehicle is out of production, is a hour that it isn’t out operating and producing revenue.

LED lights are a great solution which can help you minimise downtime for light servicing (or eliminate it altogether) for the life of the vehicle.

More Environmentally Responsible

Most HID, halogen and incandescent lights contain hazardous waste in the form of mercury, lead, sodium or other hazardous materials. Globally, discarded lighting products account for 23 tons of mercury waste each and every year. That’s enough mercury to poison every litre of water in the United States and Canada!

LEDs, on the other hand, do not contain any hazardous waste and are completely recyclable – thus eliminating pollution and the danger of related mercury absorption into the environment. Imagine the reduced impact you can make on our environment by using LEDs for your lighting needs!

Compliance with Worldwide Standards

When you choose a J.W. Speaker LED light, you’re not only getting a product that has passed rigorous in-house safety testing – you’re getting a product that has earned the seal of approval from government agencies and third party testing facilities around the globe.

Unmatched Longevity

Regardless of whether you’re looking for a high-quality OEM lighting solution or that perfect aftermarket replacement light, there’s no denying that LED technology offers a product lifespan that’s second to none. LED lights out-live incumbent lighting technologies many, many times over.

Unsurpassed energy efficiency

One of the key technical advantages that LED lights have to offer is their energy efficiency. The growth of vehicle electronics and the ballooning cost of fuel have created a need for high efficiency vehicle components to minimise the load on the alternator and the drain on the battery. LED drivers (>80% efficiency) coupled with high lumen-per-watt LEDs create a winning solution to keep the required battery current low.

As you can see in the diagram below, LEDs offer superior efficiency compared to other lighting technologies – which can ultimately bring you greater fuel economy on your vehicles.

Reduce Driving Fatigue

Studies show that our body’s internal clock (called the circadian rhythm) is linked to the cycle of night and day. More specifically, our brains interpret the colour temperature of light we’re exposed to and then tell the body whether we should be alert or at rest.

The colour temperature scale (measured in degrees Kelvin) indicates that traditional lights have a colour temperature signature that closely resembles sunset – when our brain tells our body that it is time to prepare for sleep. LED lights, on the other hand, closely mimic the characteristics of a bright noon day sun, when the body is most awake.

NOT ALL LIGHTS ARE CREATED EQUAL

Anyone who has ever shopped around for LED lights can tell you that manufacturers commonly boast high output values. What these manufacturers may fail to tell you, however, is that the numbers they’re using reflect the raw (theoretical) output of the LEDs and not the effective (actual) light output of the lights as a whole.  The difference can be huge!

The raw output is calculated by multiplying the maximum output rating of the LED chip by the number of LED chips in the light. No testing is involved and this figure doesn’t take into account any of the optical and thermal losses that truly exist in the real world. What you as a consumer are really looking for is the effective output – you want to know how much actual “effective” light a light puts out. To arrive at the effective light output number for a light, the manufacturer must conduct photometric testing which not only accounts for optical and thermal losses, but also factors in assembly variations.

So the next time you see a manufacturer throwing a huge Lumen number at you, challenge them to provide you with both the raw and the effective output numbers so that you can truly make an apples-to-apples comparison.

If you have specific questions about LED technology or LED lights, please contact us on
+27(0)11 389 5300 or sales@flosolve.co.za 

Article sourced from J.W. Speaker Corporation
https://www.jwspeaker.com/resources/10-reasons-to-upgrade-your-headlights-to-led/