Light Bulbs with Fans?!

I bet Thomas Edison never would’ve thought we’d end up making light bulbs with fans inside them when he invented the light bulb 100 years ago. That’s what I’ve been seeing more and more of lately both online and at the Las Vegas Lightfair I attended a couple months back (more on that in a future blog entry). Why? Because it’s a race right now for every manufacturer to make a brighter bulb and grab the largest share of the market possible. So why the fans?

To understand this a little better, let’s get into a little bit of LED bulb design theory. There’s three main components in an LED bulb:
1. Chip/Die – This is the LED itself
2. Heatsink – This is what keeps LED Chip/Die cool
3. Optics – This is the lens that directs the light out of the bulb – giving you a narrow/wide beam of light

CREE is the #1 US manufacturer(brightest) for LED dies right now. (See our LED Buying Guide for more information). We can pretty much assume the majority of manufacturers are using the same chip. What about the lens? As important as the lens is, you can only bend the light in so many ways, and the light output increase is only marginal using the same chip.

So what’s the solution? Pack more LED’s into one place or drive them harder by putting more electricity through them. What happens when you do either of these and what’s the #1 killer of LED’s? Heat.

So we need a way of keeping them cool. OK let’s just make a bigger heatsink:

But now the bulb won’t fit in a traditional socket. “Doh”

OK, what about a fan? “Aha!”. This will let us keep a small form factor, and keep the bulbs the same size.

Sounds like a great idea at first but aren’t LED’s rated at 50,000 hours? That’s 17 years at 8 hours a day. Ever opened up a computer after 2 years and seen the amount of gunk the fans have picked up? Imagine the amount of gunk that they will pick up after 5 or 10 years? What happens then? Fan stops > LED overheats > LED dies. There goes $50 to $100.

That’s my thoughts. I just don’t think LED bulbs with fans are the way to go. There’s no way they can possibly last 17 years unless we come up with a self-cleaning fan technology. I DID find a company that came up with a brighter bulb without a fan and am about to get samples of this bulb. Pictures to come…
Anyone think otherwise? Anyone tried an LED bulb with fans?