LED lamps consume a miniscule fraction of the energy of incandescent or fluorescent globes to create light, but the heat generated as a byproduct of the process is detrimental to the diodes’ long-term life span. Jake Dyson, the son of prolific inventor and engineering genius James Dyson, was involved in the development of Dyson Lighting’s CSYS lamp — boasting a 154,000 hour life, or 37 years of use — that will be released in Australia in 2016.
Dyson says the CSYS system solves a problem inherent with LED lights — the problem of the diodes’ small heatsinks not being able to transfer heat away effectively faster than it is being created. Over the long term, this means that overheated LED lights lose their efficiency and suffer lowered brightness; CSYS, inspired by the systems used in satellites, uses heatpipes — just like those in your laptop, or in the graphics card in your gaming PC — to transfer heat away.
I’ve seen the CSYS lamps — both a desk- or bedside-sized model, and a larger floor-standing variant — in action, and they’re utterly beautiful. The entire horizontal segment of the lamp warms up when it’s switched on; that’s proof enough that the internal phase-change heatpipe is doing its work. The designs are utterly minimalist — there’s a neck and an arm, both of which are adjustable and that swivel over a 360-degree range, milled out of thin but sturdy (and heat-conductive) aluminium.
The heatpipe tech means that the CSYS lights boast a run-time of 154,000 hours, or 37 years when used continuously for 11 hours per day. (The lights might last even longer than you do.) Dyson is bringing at least two different CSYS lamps to Australia in 2016; we don’t yet know pricing or the exact release date, but the same lights are already available in the UK for £399 and £599 for the desk and floor variants respectively with black, white and silver colourways on offer.
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