Lighting the dark is tough on the environment. It’s gotten better with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs and compact fluorescents lights but can a light bulb get even more eco-friendly? A Seattle start-up company called Vu1 is banking its future on creating a better light bulb.
The company’s Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) lighting technology is neither incandescent nor fluorescent nor LED. The company’s chief marketing officer Ron Davis told Residential Lighting, an industry website last month, that its bulbs will be energy-efficient, mercury-free, totally nontoxic and household disposable. That’s good news for places that are getting strict regulations on light bulbs, especially those banning incandescents.
The new bulb will be fully dimmable with instant-on capability and should interface with existing lighting controls. Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) send currents through a mercury vapor and LEDs, such as EarthLEDs, use no mercury and create light by electrically stimulating a semiconductor material that emits UV light. Vu1 claims its ESL bulbs will create the same light quality as an incandescent but is more energy efficient and won’t use any neurotoxin mercury in the lighting process.
The company says its bulbs will be cleaner than CFLs, with its mercury and twisted shape, and greener than LEDs with their heavy heat dissipation. It does this by its patented technology of using accelerated electrons to stimulate phosphor to create light, making the surface of the bulb “glow” and thereby emit light.
Vu1 says it can use standard light bulb glass and will fit into class light bulb shapes familiar to consumers anywhere. It anticipates its mercury-free bulbs will be available sometime early next year and is pricing the bulbs at $12, which puts it on par with dimmable compact fluorescent lights. There’s no proof yet of how well ESLs work and until it comes on the market, we’ll remain in the dark on just how different this new light bulb is from LEDs and CFLs.
