May LED lighting contest winner is racking up the energy savings with home renovations

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Minnesota resident Nicole Ronich is always on the lookout for LED lighting. Her father introduced her to LEDs years ago and lately she’s noticed that LED lighting is on the rise. She even recently learned that the Minnesota Twins’ Target Field features display boards lit with LEDs.

So when Ronich saw that Cree was giving away LED lights in a monthly photo contest, her thoughts drifted to her dimly-lit bathroom. She snapped this photo and later won the May LED Lighting giveaway.

May Photo Contest Winner

Nicole Ronich won the May LED lighting giveaway with this photo.

Here’s what she wrote about her bathroom lighting: “This is an old and hideous light fixture that is so inefficient. It also blows out light bulbs every other week. It gives my bathroom the shadow effect. I hate putting my make up on under it!”

I don’t blame her for not wanting to apply her makeup under this light. Hopefully her new energy-efficient LED lighting will improve lighting conditions in her home. Here’s what she wrote me when I e-mailed her to say she won the May photo contest:

“We have an older home and have been doing a ton of remodeling and updating of appliances to energy efficiency, improving insulation and replacing drafty doors, etc. It has been fun watching the utility bills drop! So, changing to a more efficient light bulb would be another step in the greener direction. My bathroom is going to be one of our last projects and to have better lighting would be awesome.”

If you’re jealous of Nicole’s new LED lighting, then enter our June LED Lighting giveaway for a chance to win some energy-efficient lights of your very own. Here’s how easy it is to enter:

Then, maybe I’ll be writing about your new lights soon! Congrats, Nicole!

You can learn how to make gorgeous LED pendant lights

Friday, April 16th, 2010

One of the world’s largest lighting tradeshows is wrapping up today in Frankfurt, Germany. More than 1,500 companies in the lighting business exhibited their goods and services at Light+Building. Among the items on display in the Cree booth are these gorgeous LED pendant lights:

Pendant lights at lightbuilding

These lights were recently crafted by our application engineers to show the world yet another example of how LEDs can be used to make beautiful lights. I haven’t had a chance to chat with any of my colleagues who are working the booth in Germany, but I’m guessing they’re fielding a lot of questions about these beautiful lights.

 How can I be so sure? Well, a few weeks ago two of these lights were installed in our office, and on several occasions, folks from other departments have stopped by to ask about the pretty new lights. And, admittedly, every time I pass this corner of our office, I wish I could snag one to replace the single incandescent pendant light that wastes energy in my kitchen.

So how can you get your hands on one? Well, you can’t – yet. You see, our application engineers created these pendant prototypes to show lighting manufacturers how easy building an LED light can be using one of our newest LED components, the Cree XLamp ® MPL EasyWhite ™ LED. This new multichip LED (we announced it back in February) can shorten the design and manufacturing cycle for new lighting products because the LEDs are specified like traditional light sources. Designers just have to indicate the desired color temperature and brightness, which can save time on learning the ins and outs of what we in the LED industry call binning.

If you look closely, the spiral metal at the top of the glass shade appears to be a decorative feature, but really it’s a heat sink designed to dissipate heat. And while they aren’t a commercial product, these particular pendants were designed to last 50,000 hours. And when used with a frosted white shade, an XLamp MP-L-based pendant can be an ENERGY STAR®-conformant SSL luminaire.

Our engineers made their design notes available for anyone to download. It’s just another way we’re leading the LED lighting revolution.

Cree brings the LED Lighting Revolution home at the International Builders’ Show

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Take one look at our booth at the International Builders’ Show and you’ll see that we’re serious about bringing LED Lighting into your home.

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In the LED lighting biz, we often hear from people who say they bought an LED bulb at the grocery store and it stunk. As a result, they write off LED lighting as an expensive technology that doesn’t live up to its price tag, or billing.

At Cree, our hearts seriously break a little each time we hear that. Our booth at the International Builders’ Show explains why. You see, we’re making these gorgeous recessed LED lights that provide beautiful, warm color and are designed to last a crazy long time (50,000 hours). These LED lights are the real deal. They’re not too dim. They’re not bluish. They don’t flicker.

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Yet, like anything, it often only takes one bad apple to give everyone else a bad name. My co-worker Deb actually blogged today about the LED bulbs you can buy in the store that are supposed to be a 60-Watt equivalent.  Deb wrote: “Unfortunately, except for a few, they are mostly too dim or bluish, or worse, flicker and then go out for good.”

So we’re hoping that our booth at the International Builders’ Show will help SHOW people that LED lighting is ready for the home. It just depends on the type of LED lighting you use and how you use it.

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All the lights you see in these photos from our booth are Cree LED lights, and we think they’re beautiful. True, they’re not light bulbs that you would screw into your desk lamp, but they provide very efficient overhead lighting for your home. And that, my friends, makes our hearts sing.

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