Nope, you aren’t looking at a weird decorative light bulb-shaped sculpture. The Wooden Light by designer Ryosuke Fukusada is a functional light bulb that looks just like a solid piece of wood.

Fukusada created the light bulb in collaboration with German light bulb maker LEDON. The illusion was invented by creating an exceptionally thin – 1/10th of one inch – bulb shaped casing of wood veneer. An LED is fitted inside to illuminate the illusory mini-lampshade.

When the light is turned off, the bulb looks just like a solid piece of wood hanging from a cord – perhaps a piece of minimalist art or funky decor. But when it is turned on, the light shines through the rings, swirls, and natural shapes of the wood grain.

The lovely light looks red as it makes its way through the pine covering. It isn’t as bright as a normal light bulb; the designer likens it to holding a flashlight in your hand. But its unique look and lovely ambient light would let it fit in perfectly in any room.

The post Wonderul Wooden Light Bulb Shines With Warm Subtle Glow first appeared on Gajitz.

Dimming light fixtures are a great way to save money on energy, but not everyone has the luxury of having these money-saving fixtures in their homes. Finally, there is a way dim your bulbs without replacing all of your light fixtures. The Nanoleaf Bloom is a brilliant light bulb that acts like it’s attached to a dimmer even when it’s installed in a regular light socket with a standard on/off switch.

The Bloom is the even-more-impressive kid sibling of the Nanoleaf One, touted as the world’s most energy efficient light bulb. While the Nanoleaf One focused on energy efficiency and changing the shape of the conventional light bulb, the Nanoleaf Bloom takes the revolution one step further: it lets you adjust the brightness of the bulb based on your needs at that moment.

Dimming your bulbs to 50% of their maximum brightness can cut your electricity use by up to 40 percent. With the Nanoleaf Bloom, full brightness uses up just 10 watts of electricity, and at 50% the bulb uses an impressive 2.6 watts. One bulb will provide 30,000 hours of light, which comes out to 27 years if the bulb is on for 3 hours each day.

To use the dimming feature in a non-dimmer outlet, you just have to flick the on/off switch. An embedded microprocessor changes the bulb’s brightness, which you can “lock in” to set the default brightness when you turn the bulb on. The truly impressive project raised more than three times its Kickstarter funding goal in just over a week, proving that there is plenty of interest in bringing the Nanoleaf Bloom into homes – even if it is just a little funny looking.

The post Uber-Efficient Light Bulb Turns Any Socket into a Dimmer first appeared on Gajitz.

That old potato battery experiment from your seventh-grade science class sure was a boring one. Then again, so are most to a twelve-year-old. Simply put, an electrical current is produced when opposite sides of a potato are impaled with a galvanized nail and copper wire. A Bangor, Maine-based artist sees it as much more than that.

“The utter simplicity of this electrical phenomenon is endlessly fascinating for me,” artist Caleb Charland said. He used this idea for his photography series ‘Back to Light’. In the collection, various fruits and vegetables provide the current of electricity for the light source in his long exposure photographs.

The fruits or vegetables act as working batteries, powering small light bulbs that illuminate just enough for the pictures. The effect is an eerie one, as just enough of the dim light surrounds the produce to create a ghostly glow.

Charland went on to express a lofty goal for the series. “My hope is that these photographs function as micro utopias by suggesting and illustrating the endless possibilities of alternative and sustainable energy production.”

The post Lime Light: Produce Powers Light Source In Photo Series first appeared on Gajitz.

The start of 2014 was accompanied by the beginning of a government phase-out plan that was created to eliminate the production of all incandescent light bulbs. CFL and LED bulbs will take over for the outdated (and outlawed) incandescents, but consumers have had a number of problems with the idea of the change.

One of these problems is the cost. An incandescent light bulb might cost a dollar or two, but the average LED bulb will run you around $20. This isn’t a bad deal given the fact that LED bulbs can last up to 20 years and use much less energy than the incandescent design, but it still stings when you’re trying to scrape together enough pennies to replace the burned-out bulb in your bathroom.

The reason for the steep cost has a lot to do with LED bulbs’ tendency to get very hot very quickly. To counter this overheating, most manufacturers attach a heavy metal heat sink to the bulb’s base like in the photo above. Technology conglomerate Philips solved the problem in an admirably quirky way: they flattened the light bulb.

Their LED bulb design features a horseshoe shaped array of LED diodes. The redesigned bulbs still emit an appropriate amount of light, but by losing the need for a heat sink the cost is cut in half. Philips’ SlimStyle bulbs retail for $9.97 (at the time of publication) for a 60-watt equivalent bulb.

The post Affordable Philips LED Bulb Is Flat, Light and Energy Efficient first appeared on Gajitz.

When the electricity cuts off unexpectedly, you might be left searching around for a flashlight or a candle. But a bright idea from Shailendra Suman could keep the lights on even when the electricity goes off. The SmartCharge light bulb uses a regular socket and looks a lot like a regular light bulb, but it helps you see for hours after the electricity goes off.

The guts of the SmartCharge bulb includes a little circuit board, battery, CPU, inverter, and control technology to keep it lit even when everyone else’s lights go dark. When the light bulb is screwed in as normal and is lighting the room, the battery is charging. If the electricity does go out, the SmartCharge bulb stays lit with no interruption for up to four hours.

While the electricity is out, the charged-up battery keeps the bulb lit – and the light can even be controlled from the wall switch as usual. The bulb can sense whether it is drawing power from the grid or from its battery, so even if the rest of the house has no power you can walk into a room, flip the switch and never even notice that the power is out.

The project is meant to provide peace of mind, security and safety in a power outage. Even in the worst-case scenario where the electricity it out for more than the light bulb’s four-hour battery life, the bulb will at least give you enough time to find flashlights and other emergency equipment. Unfortunately, however, the SmartCharge bulb won’t keep you from having to reset every clock in your house once the power comes back on.

The post LED Bulb Doesn’t Leave You in Dark When the Power Goes Out first appeared on Gajitz.