The Ugliest LED Light Bulb

The developers of the nanoleaf are making big claims for their 10-sided Frankenbulb.

LED lighting for the home has been understated, discrete. The kitchen task lights do their work without attention. Replacement bulbs are becoming reassuringly like the incandescent bulbs that used to illumine your mother's knitting.

And then comes the nanoleaf, bringing us Edison's elegance by way of Bizarro World. (The bulb's name is spelled sometimes lowercase, sometimes camelcase -- NanoLeaf -- on the website; we're going with lowercase.)

The nanoleaf is seriously ugly.

It also claims to be the world's most efficient light bulb.

It is rated at 150 lumens per watt for its top-of-the-line 1800-lm bulb (equivalent to a 110W incandescent). The company offers two other A19 bulbs, 1200 lm (~75W) and 1600 lm (~100W), that claim 120 lm/W and 133 lm/W respectively. (The bulbs are not dimmable and have a CRI of 70.)

Ugly isn't cheap. On Amazon, they start at $31.25 each in a four-pack of the 1200-lm bulbs and continue upward to $83.75 for the 1800-lm model.

The bulbs will start shipping in volume in March next year. There's a story behind that.

The history

Nanoleaf the company started in 2012 by a trio of University of Toronto graduates.

(From the Trademark-as-Spaghetti Dept., the bulb was called the NanoLight when first introduced on Kickstarter; it is made by Nanoleaf, not by NanoLight Technologies. The trademark of that latter company is NANOLIGHT, referring to a device that uses bioluminescence and chemoluminescence in laboratory testing. It is being contested by Promega Corporation.

Nanoleaf didn't hold a trademark for its LED bulb when it was called NanoLight. The name Nanoleaf, however, has a trademark pending by way of NanoGrid, a Hong Kong-based company owned by the trio that runs Nanoleaf.

Let us not even begin to discuss the patent scene.

Nanoleaf launched its Kickstarter campaign in January 2013, reaching its $20,000 goal in three days and eventually raising $270,000. With that kind of support, it's clear that they were onto something.

The company is not revealing a lot of detail about their LED sources, only to say that much of the product is custom-built to their specifications and that its components are not available for off-the-shelf. In April 2014, they featured their manufacturing process in a video, complete with a ukulele music track.

Unfortunately, the outcome wasn't as happy as the video. Early customers were returning bulbs that had failed.

Transparency

In an October blog post, the company disclosed, with refreshing candor, what was going wrong. An air void inside the bulbs was causing the gold wire that connected the LED die to the housing to bend and eventually fail. They had to scrap 150,000 LEDs and hundreds of bulbs that were planned for shipment.

A 2012 video, in preparation for their Kickstarter campaign, outlines the design principles of what was then called the NanoLight, including the printed circuit boards that make up the outer shell and host the internal circuitry. The coating and shape of the bulb improve heat dissipation, and no other heat sink is needed. As a result, the bulb is cool to the touch and can be used in an enclosed lamp.

Initially they chose a 4000K neutral white light. A short while into the production run, however, they realized that backers and customers would prefer a warmer light, particularly in the bedroom. All of the current products are listed as 3500K "warm white" -- though some might contest how "warm" that CCT is.

The bulb is rated at 30,000 hours. (As we've discussed several times in these forums, those are estimates based on extrapolation. The company hasn't been around long enough to have a production unit shining for the requisite 3.5 years needed to verify the claim.)

The nanoleaf has attracted a lot of favorable press, owing in large part to the founders' openness about their product and processes. We're not going to see this on the Walmart shelves anytime soon. That's not their goal. Nanoleaf is producing a product with an innovative design in the public arena for people who don't mind spending extra on stuff that's green and weird.