When Colleen Locchi began planning lighting for her kitchen, she thought she would go with CFLs. But the more investigating she did, the more she realized that mercury-containing CFLs likely weren’t the energy-efficient solution she wanted.
“Initially I was all about CFLs,” Colleen wrote me, “but the more research I did, the less enchanted I have become. LEDs seem to be the way to go. I did incorporate some into my new kitchen and find I now prefer them over my incandescent lamps.”
Once Colleen got a taste of LED lighting, she wanted more. So she entered (and won) our November LED lighting giveaway by submitting a picture of her large family room, which is lit almost entirely with lamps. Colleen won five Cree CR6 LED downlights, which she says she plans to use to accent her fire place and provide overhead task lighting without an assortment of lamps. Here’s the photo she submitted:
“We purchased the house in the mid-90s and the lighting in this room has been a thorn in my side ever since. The expense of the lighting always put it on the back burner so I am quite thrilled to be able to move forward with this project. I really think it will finish off the room,” Colleen wrote.
Not only will Colleen’s new Cree LED downlights deliver beautiful light quality (warm, 2700K color temperature), the lights will also save her energy. The CR6 LED downlight (pictured below) consumes only 10.5 watts, but delivers the same warm light you’d expect from a 65-watt halogen light.
And once Colleen installs her new recessed LED lighting, she won’t have to worry about changing them for years – possibly decades – to come. That’s because the CR6 LED downlight is designed to last 50,000 hours, which means Colleen could leave them lit eight hours a day, seven days a week and they could last more than 17 years. And, let’s be real, chances are Colleen’s family isn’t going to be using the lights that frequently, which means they’ll likely last even longer.
It’s hard to believe that four months ago Cree employees were framing the world’s first all LED-lit Habitat for Humanity House.
A lot has happened since that August morning when Cree employees met at the home site in Durham, North Carolina to frame the house. For starters, we broke a local record for fastest framing of a Durham Habitat home, completing the entire process in just a few hours.
Then we worked hard to build a three bedroom house for our family, the Rahlan-Ksors. The experience gave us the opportunity to learn new skills (if you need anyone to drill holes into the foundation of a home to anchor the frame, I’m your gal) and to help give a new family an energy-efficient home.
We gathered at the completed home on Saturday to celebrate with the family. As we set up for the dedication ceremony in their new driveway, Del Rahlan grabbed a broom and started sweeping away mulch that was kicked onto the sidewalk. I wouldn’t have even noticed the mulch if he hadn’t started sweeping. Then I realized how much pride Del truly had in his new home that he wanted every detail to be perfect for the ceremony.
As we stood in the family’s driveway with their church members and fellow Habitat volunteers, our CEO Chuck Swoboda announced that the LED lighting in the new home would save the family about $300 in electricity annually. It’s possible that Del and his wife won’t have to change a light bulb until their children graduate from college.
So as we celebrate the completion of the home for our Habitat family, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at the beginning. Here are some scenes from the ground breaking, way back on Aug. 7. Take a look at where we started and how it ended.
This week we’re going to giveaway 2 Cree CR6 LED downlights to one lucky tweep in our Twitter contest. Simply join us in celebrating the completion of our all LED-lit Habitat house by tweeting us with the hashtag #CreeHabitat. We’ll randomly pick one winner to win the lights (which are the same lights we’re installing in Habitat homes throughout the country) at 4:30 p.m. EST Friday, Dec. 17. Not sure what to tweet, simply Retweet what we’ve posted here.
And, of course, our standard contest rules apply: Cree’s decisions are final and binding. The contest is limited to legal residents, 18 or older, of the 50 United States and District of Columbia. Void where prohibited. Void in Arizona, Florida, New York, and Rhode Island. Winners will be notified via Twitter and must claim prize within 30 days of email notification.
Tammi Myers is my kind of woman. When it was time to register for wedding gifts, the bride-to-be and her fiancé decided they wanted to register for energy-efficient Cree LR6™ LED downlights.
Now, to be fair, Tammi probably knows a little bit more about LED lighting than your average bride because she’s a project manager for CM Buck and Associates, an Indianapolis-based company that sells lighting, including Cree LED lights. But I don’t think Tammi’s gift registry idea was that odd because a friend of mine who isn’t in the lighting business recently asked me if she could register for LED lights for her wedding too.
You can’t always get what you want …
Unfortunately, Tammi’s coworkers didn’t pool together to get her Cree LED Lighting like she hoped. But Tammi must have had some good lighting karma on her side, because Cree introduced the CR6™ LED downlight – which is designed for home and light commercial applications – shortly after her wedding. The timing was too good to pass up.
Tammi Myers and her husband Phil wanted to add Cree LED lights to their wedding registry.
Tammi wrote us at Cree to say she would really love to be among our first customers to buy and install CR6 LED downlights, which only consume 10.5 Watts and are designed to last 50,000 hours. In her email she told us about her wedding registry, and how she and her fiancé didn’t manage to snag any LED lights (talk about a guilt trip, lol).
… You get what you need
So in July we shipped her 10 Cree CR6 LED downlights (since she works for one of our lighting distributors, she paid the distributor rate, but she still had to buy them) and a flip cam. We asked her to film her installation and to share feedback on the lights. We had no idea what her reaction to the lights would be (though we hoped she would love them since we sure do).
Turns out, Tammi did love the lights. She also loved being on camera too. She sent us back a lot of footage. The first video featured her husband installing the CR6 LED downlight for the first time, take a look:
Then she sent us some footage of her replacing the CFLs in her entry way with the CR6 LED downlights. I had a fun time editing this into a little package for you:
Before and After: What a difference LEDs make
She also shared some of her before and after pictures. In all, she replaced five 65-Watt Halogen flood lights in the kitchen, two 26-Watt CFLs her entry way (see video above), one 65-Watt BR30 lamp in the hallway (see video of her husband doing the install above) along with one in a bedroom and one in her husband’s catch-all room.
Tammi's Bedroom Before and After photos
Tammi's Entryway: Watch the installation video above to see her husband install this light
Take a look at Tammi's kitchen. Note how with her Halogen lights you couldn't read the "love, laugh, smile" decorations on top of her cabinets.
What a difference LED lights can make! Watch the video above for more details on this entryway!
Now that Tammi has had a few months to reflect on her new Cree CR6 LED downlights, we asked her to write us and tell us what she thinks. Here’s what she said:
“This is what I tell my friends and family who aren’t in the lighting industry. It’d be crazy to say I love my new lighting, I mean, it’s lighting, it’s almost supposed to be invisible since it’s not the decorative lighting. But it does absolutely everything it was promised and more. The best part is how much more light it seems to give. It hits the wall higher and more broadly and doesn’t give me the scallops on the wall like downlights usually do. I never used to sit around and hate the scallops, but with the new downlights, I either have more light or it appears to give more light, either of which I’m happy to keep.”
We can’t argue with that. Thanks for being our guinea pig, Tammi! Now we just have to get our distributors to offer wedding registries. To find a distributor near you, just type in your zipcode on this page.
And Tammi’s not alone in recognizing the CR6 LED downlight. Last month at the American Lighting Association conference in Las Vegas, the CR6 received a “Lighting for Tomorrow” design award.
If you don’t have a recessed downlight in your home or office, chances are you know someone who does. An estimated 500 million downlights are installed in homes throughout the United States, according the U.S. Department of Energy. And that number is growing, with an estimated 30 to 40 recessed lights going into newly-constructed homes.
With so many downlights lighting up American homes, there’s a big opportunity to save a lot of energy with LED lighting. But how? Well, today we’re ecstatic to announce that the LED Lighting is officially coming home! That’s right, Home Depot customers can now buy affordable six-inch LED downlights powered with Cree TrueWhite® Technology online at HomeDepot.com. This LED light is also targeted to be available in nearly 2,000 Home Depot retail stores in fall 2010.
Sold as the EcoSmart LED Downlight, this new energy-efficient light retails for less than $50 and features the award-winning technology that sets Cree’s LED lights apart from other LED products on the market — Cree TrueWhite Technology.
This is truly a milestone for the LED Lighting Revolution. Here are six reasons you should be excited about the EcoSmart LED Downlight:
1. Incredible Light Quality: Let’s face it, we love saving energy but we hate it when energy-saving light makes a room look like a dungeon. You truly don’t have to sacrifice light quality with the EcoSmart LED Downlight. This downlight is powered with Cree TrueWhite Technology, which delivers high efficiency with beautiful, warm color by mixing the light from unsaturated yellow and red LEDs.
Cree’s one-of-a-kind approach maintains high color accuracy over the life of the EcoSmart LED Downlight, exceeding even ENERGY STAR® color consistency requirements for LED lighting! That means the light quality is beautiful and can stay that way throughout the long-life of these fixtures.
2. Extremely Long Lasting: What if you didn’t have to haul out a ladder to change bulbs in your ceilings for decades? The EcoSmart LED Downlight is designed to last 35,000 hours. That means this light could last you more than 32 years with three hours of daily use. Install it in a hard-to-reach places such as foyers, high-ceiling kitchens and family rooms and you can avoid the hassle of dragging a ladder into your home to replace burned out bulbs…for years! In fact, you may never have to buy another light bulb (sorry, Thomas Edison).
3. Big Energy Savings: Imagine this scenario: Swapping out the 65-Watt incandescent light screwed into your recessed fixture with a 10.5-Watt LED light, while still having beautiful light quality. Now, wake up, you don’t have to daydream anymore.
The EcoSmart LED Downlight consumes only 10.5 Watts and doesn’t waste energy as heat like incandescent lights do. That means you can cook in your kitchen without feeling like your downlights are cooking you. Bonus: This downlight is dimmable to 5 percent, so you can rack up even more energy savings while having mood lighting for a romantic dinner or a scary movie. And, unlike, fluorescent lights, LED lights don’t contain toxic mercury. LED lights are also instant-on, which means you don’t have to wait for the lights to achieve full brightness, like you do with many fluorescents.
4. It’s Affordable: The EcoSmart LED Downlight will sell for less than $50. And considering its extremely long life and energy savings potential, you can stand to save a lot of money over the life of the fixture. This is the first affordably-priced and widely distributed consumer product to use Cree TrueWhite Technology. Bonus: Some utility companies are offering rebates. We’ll keep you posted on those, but feel free to inquire with your local utility provider.
5. Easy to Install: How many people does it take to screw in an EcoSmart LED Downlight? Just one. This light installs easily into most standard six-inch recessed insulated ceiling or non-insulated ceiling housings. It’s designed for new construction and retrofit. Need specific instructions? Watch this video.
6. You’ll Be Part of the LED Lighting Revolution: It’s one thing to support the concept of energy-efficient LED lighting, and we LOVE all of you who do. That being said, it’s another thing to experience LED lighting in your home. In fact, if you order the EcoSmart LED Downlight, please feel free to post your reviews on HomeDepot.com and to add them to our comments section. We would love to hear about your experiences.
You can find the EcoSmart LED Downlight on HomeDepot.com simply by typing “LED Downlight” in the search field. Or just click this link for the first step toward your energy-savings future.
Dave Hultin recently wrote me through the contact form on the LED Revolution site saying he joined the revolution more than a year ago, when he outfitted his home with LED lights. I interviewed him last week to find out more. This is his story:
When Dave Hultin began designing his home in Fargo, North Dakota, he knew he wanted to incorporate energy efficient lighting. That’s when he started doing his homework. He knew CFLs were out of the question because he said his wife wasn’t keen on the potential health issues that could arise if any of the mercury-laden CFLs ever broke.
One night Dave was holding his son’s LED flashlight and he said he started to wonder if LEDs were being developed for residential lighting. He found a 40 Watt equivalent LED bulb online and ordered it. He was disappointed when it arrived and it had a “laser beam feeling.”
“I wasn’t ready to give up,” he said. “I thought: ‘there’s got to be something better.’”
Dave said he started to read about the Cree LR6™ LED recessed light that, at the time, was only 12 Watts but delivered warm light. (A newer version is now only 10.5 Watts!). So he found a local supplier and bought four and had an electrician install them in his master bedroom, which was still under construction. He didn’t even have switches in place yet.
Dave was a skeptic and wanted to see if they would have the “Star Wars light saber effect” or if his family could actually live comfortably under the LED light. After the electrician installed his test lights, Dave visited the construction site to see how they looked.
“I remember that first night when I came there. I went there when it was dark. I was expecting the best, but hoping I wasn’t going to get a wimpy, little glow,” Dave said. “So I tentatively turned it on and I went ‘Yes!’ That’s when I was convinced it was a good thing.”
So Dave placed an order for more LR6 LED lights. In all, he placed 44 in his living room, kitchen, dining room, hallways, piano room and master bedroom. (Here are some pics Dave took and e-mailed me):
“The biggest thing that I would say about the light quality is that I don’t have to talk about the light quality,” Dave told me. “It’s there and it’s what I would expect. I don’t have the Star Wars light saber effect going up to the ceiling. People don’t notice that something is different, they just see that it’s there and it works.”
Dave said he spent $3,867 on the LED lights. And by his calculations, the lights will pay for themselves in energy savings after three years (he has already lived in his home for a year). But since the LR6 LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours, he’ll be racking up the savings long afterward.
“When I go to a relative or a friend’s house and notice they have a burned out bulb, I look at my watch and think: ‘In another 12 to 15 years, I’ll be doing that too,’” Dave said.
