New Plasma Tic-Tac bulb(140w=400w HID)

Just had my attention drawn to this video about a tiny new Plasma bulb by Luxim. It's different from the Larger SulphurPlasma lights that are available already and have a great daylight spectrum apparently. Have a look.....JBo
http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13568_22-192842.html

interesting, but they dont give specs.... but i didnt really do any looking so maybe there is.

man, the future is looking great.

didnt they also say: "It gets as hot as the sun" How would u cool something like that?

$$$$. It will be years, even decades before this will become viable. Nice technology, though. As far as heat-- I would guess that they will be enclosed in a heat resistant fixture of some sort. If the bulb can get that hot, then it is surely able to withstand very high temperatures.

Yeah a better link here with a little info:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/18/luxim-wants-to-brighten-your-block-with-ultra-powerful-plasma-li/

This may help with any Temperature confusion \/


Luxim was stating the gas temperature inside the bulb, *not* the color temperature. If you had worked around plasma, you’d know that such temperatures are not uncommon and they do *not* “burn up everything around it.”

Plasma is extremely hot but not very dense (unless you’re *trying* to make it dense like in experimental fusion reactors). Thus it can be “put out” like a fire with very little effort. I’ve seen people stick their hands into a plasma gas cloud. It “puts out” the plasma like you’ve thrown water on it and it doesn’t even warm you hand. For that matter, you can aim a plasma cutter right at your hand from as little as three or four inches away and you won’t cut your hand off. It won’t burn, it won’t even get warm. The plasma that can cut through solid steel (when close to the steel) won’t singe your skin at a couple of inches.

I don’t know the specifics of Luxim’s bulb, but I do know that 6000-degree plasma is perfectly plausible in that little capsule. It’s likely the plasma inside the capsule is too far away from anything solid for it to adversely affect it.

From this link; http://epiac1216.wordpress.com/2008/03/18/the-incredible-luxims-plasma-lightbulb/

Nightcrawler,

As far as trying to cool this thing, it wont take much at all. like a 90mm computer fan would almost be overkill.

Look at it like this. If you have something that as big as a 2 liter of soda giving off 200 F, it will take a lot of air movement to cool that thing off. But if you got something the size of a tic tac that puts off 200 F, then it'd probably only take someone blowing through a straw to cool it down. Now I know they said "hot as the sun" which isn;t really an estimate of how hot it'll be, and it is more than this 200 F tic tac that I was talking about, but it really wont need nearly as much as a 400w hps needs for cooling. To really put it to perspective, a 120mm computer fan would be far more than enough to cool this thing.

They do have many different types of light, some with more spectrums, some with not as much (not really like that, but just look at the graphs on their site), But they have one that would be PERFECT for growers, it has still a lot of green and yellow spectrum since it is designed for human visual use, but it also has nice highs in the red and blue spectrum, enough that if the energy savings is true, then it will be far superior to any other type of light besides free sunlight.

It's funny bc I was just about to make a thread about this, but you beat me to it. And being that I'm all into LED's, I almost fell out of my chair when I first found out about these light. Shit, uses less energy than LED's but puts off more light? I think I need to do some research becuase I think that the person that make that claim was comparing these lights to White LED's and only looking at lumens.

i bet if you were to compare these tic-tac lights to a high powered LED, without considering lumens (since lumens is only a messure of what humans see), that you would see that LED's can produce a higher millacandela (sp?) of a specific wavelength more efficiently than what these tic-tac light can do of the same wavelength. And what I mean by efficiently is, watt per millacandela of wavelength that us growers can use.


So in conclusion to what I think is that these lights would be great for growing and most likely better than HPS considering millacandela per watt, but when the technology comes around better for LED's, that LED's will be superior to these tic-tac lights. It's just that noone has started a good enough corporation to mainstream LED grow light setups.

In the end, if this thing put off enough heat from it to need the cooling like a 400 HPS, it would melt itself, and from what I saw on their site, this thing doesn't need any type of special cooling, and if it did, it would be a fire hazard if the cooling system were to fail. That is not something that they would be trying to advertise to architects and bussinesses to use for commercial, industrial, and residential lighting solutions. It would be way to high of a liability if these things got that hot.


P.S. Poke Smot

http://www.lifi.com/pdfs/PressReleaseLIFI-ENT-17Mar08.pdf Official press release by Luxim
http://www.lifi.com/dynamic/events.php Luxim's website if you want to do more digging. . . I'm lazy right now

Only the gas inside the bulb is getting to 6000 not the heat given off, the reason why the light is so efficient is because it isn't wasting energy by converting electricity into heat nearly as much as it is into light. Every thing I have read makes it sound as though the light bulb is relatively cool on the exterior.

Aside from grows this could revolutionize the entire way things are lit, the light in TV's could be swapped out for this, streetlights, headlights, projector lights, photography lighting, sports arenas, film lighting, scanners, copying machines ect ect. The list goes as long as light is involved in it. I for one feel that this is an incredible breakthrough.

Has any one found anything out about costs involved with this light?

IGrowWithLEDs said:

It's funny bc I was just about to make a thread about this, but you beat me to it. And being that I'm all into LED's, I almost fell out of my chair when I first found out about these light. Shit, uses less energy than LED's but puts off more light? I think I need to do some research becuase I think that the person that make that claim was comparing these lights to White LED's and only looking at lumens.

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I'm glad you came with your input IGWL as we seem to share a thirst for new lighting tech,I have been waiting for Decent Plasma light's since I read about the long glass tubes with spinning bulb's on the end back in the 90's.
Would appreciate any extra post's and info on the thread and I'm no expert so just wanted all the best info here for all to see. Will (finger's crossed)have use of a Sulphur Plasma light in a month or so for a test crop against HPS/MH light's of similar wattage and will have a decent camera then so will start a proper Grow thread then. Thank's again JBo

Mt Toaker said:

Aside from grows this could revolutionize the entire way things are lit, the light in TV's could be swapped out for this, streetlights, headlights, projector lights, photography lighting, sports arenas, film lighting, scanners, copying machines ect ect. The list goes as long as light is involved in it. I for one feel that this is an incredible breakthrough.

Has any one found anything out about costs involved with this light?

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Hello Mt Toaker thanks for the Link's and input it's much appreciated!
I was wondering about Prices myself but nothing so far,Sorry! JBo

s 250 watts of power, but outperforms a 400 watt LED. Gas inside the tiny bulb is electrified by a component called a puck, which heats the gas into plasma and produces light, allowing a sizable chunk of energy to become light rather than heat -- thus the ultra-bright performance. Inside the mint-sized bulb the gas reaches 6000-degrees Kelvin -- or about the surface temperature of the Sun -- producing 140 lumens per watt, or roughly ten times that of a standard lightbulb. Really, it's quite bright. Still, a Tic Tac would probably be more refreshing.

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140 lumens/watt!! Isn't that the same as a 1000 watt Hortilux @ 140,000 lumens?

So what's the big deal?

BlindDate said:

So what's the big deal?

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apparently the big deal is the small size
bulb the of a tic-tac....that's pretty cool

I think so too. . . plus the fact that the 1000 watt hortilux runs at 1000 watts and not the 625 that the ticktac is running at. And the heat that wont be produced so you could put 6 ticktacs in there instead of 1 1000 watt hortilux. . .

I don't think prices are going to be released until mid April when they officially release the bulb at the Germany International Trade Show.

Oh man this is too cool. Just think of what this means for all the micro/cabinet growers. a tic-tac sized 250w bulb that puts out approximately 35000 lumens. That's phenominal. And you should be able to cool one of these things like it's nothing. I wonder what the deal is on the ballast or whatever is going to be used to power it.

In for cool new technology!

omg.... i cant wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not bad especially at 6000k just between a mh and a growlux bulb

little heat ...dude i will get one of them or 100 lol.....in errrr 20 years?

pritty cool that 250watt gives off the same as a growlux standard 400watt (35,000 lumens)

Bump for more information.