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As a kid, I was inspired by the decorative lighting in my grandparents' finished basement. They had festooned the place with multicolored C9 string lights (aka old-school Christmas lights) from wall to wall, beneath the built-in wet bar, around hanging mirrors, and anywhere else they could add an ambient accent for the parties they hosted down there year-round.
Since then, I've festooned every home I've lived in with decorative lighting, whether in a sequestered man cave or throughout my apartment. In short, I've spent an embarrassing amount of money on lighting up my abode like a carnival attraction. So it was good news for me when manufacturers introduced a more cost-effective, environmentally sound lighting option: the LED (light emitting diode).
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A rudimentary form of LED tech surfaced as far back as the late 1960s, but its illumination was weak and limited to one end of the spectrum (the red end). Once LED lighting became popular for consumer use in the early 2000s, its evolution toward brighter bulbs and higher efficiency was relatively swift.
Today, LED bulbs are replacing other types of bulbs for every application, from plant-growing arrays to decorative rope lights to arrestingly bright floodlights. LED is the new standard for both practical and ambient lighting, and we're much better off for it -- for several reasons.
LED lights waste less energy than traditional bulbs
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For one thing, LED bulbs are way more efficient than older types of lighting technology. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that every mechanism (natural or man-made) that transfers energy is subject to some degree of waste. Incandescent lightbulbs, for example, are pitifully inefficient. As little as 10% of the electricity they consume is converted into visible light. The remaining 90% is lost as heat. That's not the case with LEDs.
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