LED Lights At Home

Over the past few months, I have been snapping pictures of various products on the shelves at Home Depot, my local grocery, and my local hardware store. To give you a sense of how many LED-based products are out there now, I have assembled this gallery, with a range from the downright silly to the highly practical.

These are all specialty, niche types of products. Why do they matter? Because they build demand for LEDs, allowing manufacturers to achieve economies of scale and earn revenue through which to fund research. Combining the lower costs of manufacturing at scale and performance/cost improvements from research, mainstream products (ie, that will replace existing light bulbs) will inevitably get to market.

Magnifiers

In specialty applications like these where space, size and lower power consumption (which can allow small battery size) are a premium, LEDs are a natural. These are really handy products that are difficult to do with incandescent technology — at least LEDs make them much better.

 Nightlights

I didn’t even photograph all of these because an incandescent-based nightlight is real rarity. But there is a pretty wide variety of them now

Flashlights

In my casual survey, maybe 25 – 30% of flashlights are now LED, including these at my local Ace Hardware:

Lights for dark corners

I’ve reviewed one of these Fulcrum brand lights and these are really useful types of lights. We all have dark drawers, cabinets, or shelves where these come in really handy.

Sylvania gets into the act.

I found the lights below at my local grocery store. A brand like Sylvania certainly brings credibility to a new category like this and mass distribution in grocery stores is an important step toward mainstreaming the technology.

And then there are the just plain silly applications for LED lights!