You know the lighting in your home isn’t working for you when you intentionally avoid turning the lights on. That’s what Jerry Saltzer has been doing in his home’s living room and office for some time. Instead, he relies on floor and table lamps to illuminate the areas. How come?
“The living room (and office) in our house is equipped with incandescent downlights in 16.5 foot ceilings,” Saltzer told me in an email. “The light they produce is fine, but replacing those light bulbs is such a big production that we are inclined to leave them off as much as possible and use floor and table lamps instead.”
Jerry wins five Cree LR6™ LED Downlights, which he plans to install in his living room. The LR6 downlight consumes only 10.5 Watts and delivers the warm light of a 65 Watt incandescent light. And Jerry’s new LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours, which means he won’t have to deal with the hassle of swapping out his living room lights for years to come.
“Installing LED lights with an expected lifetime of 50,000 hours means that we can turn them on every evening and yet probably won’t need to change them until 2050,” Jerry wrote.
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.
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.
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:
Snap a photo of bad lighting in your home or office
CBS News recently visited some of the top LED lighting manufacturers in the industry – including Cree – to discuss the demise of Thomas Edison’s light bulb and the rise of LED Lighting.
The resulting 6-minute news package is packed with some good information about why CFLs aren’t the solution to the upcoming incandescent ban (many incandescent bulbs will be banned widely come 2014). If you’re not into video, you can read the CBS News story here.
And as Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda says in his interview with CBS News, you should be pleased with the light quality you get from LED lights. “The difference between a regular light bulb and an LED light bulb, what you should notice is almost nothing,” Swoboda said. “That’s the key to making the technology work.”
Charlie Trinh was surfing the Internet looking for “green products” when he found CreeLEDRevolution.com. The Houston, Texas resident says he saw our monthly photo contest and decided to give it a try.
“I needed brighter lights for my business,” Charlie said in an e-mail to me. He owns a coffee shop with a Hawaiian theme. “I want to convert over to LED lights but I would like to sample it out first before buying.”
Well, lucky for Charlie, he was the winner for our April LED lighting giveaway. He submitted this very dark photo of the counter at his coffee shop. This dark photo won Charlie five Cree LRP-38™ LED lights. His new 11 Watt LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours, which means he could leave them on for eight hours a day, 365 days a year and they could last 17 years! And did I mention that would be an 85% percent energy savings if he replaced electricity-sucking incandescent?
“That was my coffee shop with all the lights on, and it was still dark,” Charlie wrote.
We’re excited to bring LED lights into Charlie’s life and business. Prior to winning these lights he said his only experience with LED lights was with his LED flashlight. (You may recall that was also the case for Fargo, ND homeowner Dave Hultin).
Are you jealous of Charlie’s new energy-efficient Cree LED lights? Don’t be. Just enter our monthly photo contest for your chance to win five of your own. All you have to do is take a photo of bad lighting in your home, office, business, etc. and submit it here.
Seriously, I bet you can do that in five minutes. And spending five minutes to snap and upload a picture seems like a good use of time if it means you have a chance to win five Cree LED lights. Ready, Set, Go!
Specifically we’ll be providing our CR6™ downlight, which is targeted to go to market this summer for about $60 each. This 10.5 Watt downlight is designed to last 50,000 hours, which means if homeowners use these lights four hours a day, they shouldn’t have to replace them for more than 30 years.
We’re very excited about this pledge because it can help reduce electricity costs for low-income homeowners. Habitat for Humanity already works to build homes that are more sustainable and efficient, and the addition of LED lights will help these homes save more energy.
In North Carolina, a Habitat homeowner should save almost $450 over five years by having the CR6 down lights installed instead of the currently-used halogens.* For a house in California, that jumps to nearly $600 in savings.*
A couple of weeks ago, I got to visit a Habitat home being built in Durham, NC. We delivered two of the CR6 downlights. My boss climbed up on a ladder to show the crew how to install the lights. All he did was take the trim off the existing fixture, unscrew the energy-wasting Halogen light and screwed in the CR6. Since I filmed him doing it, I was able to time him, and it took him 28 seconds! But you’ll have to take my word for it, because I’m not sure he’s ready to make his YouTube debut quite yet.
However, I also filmed the installation of the next CR6 by David Larkins, the construction director for Habitat for Humanity of Durham. I pulled him aside afterward to talk to him about the LED lights that were just installed. At the time he had no idea Cree was planning on putting these lights in kitchens at thousands of Habitat homes. Here’s what David had to say:
“We try to make a house that’s really easy to maintain, and energy efficiency is part of that,” he said. “A lot of the energy-efficiency improvements that we do just make a home that is smarter and simpler to maintain.”
Cree designed the CR6 specifically to make LED lighting more affordable for residential applications and we couldn’t think of a better residential application than inside homes for Habitat for Humanity.
*We came to this conclusion by using a North Carolina electricity rate of 9.42 cents per kWh and a California rate of 15.69 cents per kWh. We calculated four lights turned on 6 hours a day.
Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda had a tough act to follow Tuesday at the North Carolina CEO Forum. His keynote address was scheduled a few hours after the keynote delivered by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. Yes, that Ben & Jerry — the guys who brought us Cherry Garcia and Chubby Hubby. And as if speaking after the famed ice cream giants wasn’t tough enough, Ben and Jerry brought the entire audience ice cream for breakfast AND lunch!
But when Chuck is passionate about something, it radiates when he speaks. So when he took the stage at the Raleigh Marriott City Center to address the room full of business leaders, I knew it would only be a few minutes before their minds would shift from ice cream to LED lights.
The forum’s topic was “The Triple Bottom Line: 21st Century Leadership in People, Planet and Profit.” And sure enough, within minutes, Chuck was telling it straight to the audience, saying “the cleanest and cheapest energy is the energy we never use.” Then he explained that LED lighting is really all about energy-efficiency with the big bonus of actually making good business sense, since LED lights can save businesses money on energy and maintenance costs. Chuck told earlier speakers who were discussing purchasing carbon offsets that LED lighting could’ve saved them about 50 percent of what they spent since it uses so much less energy than traditional lighting.
By then, Chuck’s passion was evident and he started ragging on the 130-year-old incandescent light bulb. “About the only useful place for this is on a shelf in a museum,” Chuck said as he lifted an energy-wasting 75 Watt bulb in the air. “It’s going to be about as popular of an idea as records.”
Chuck touched on investor-owned utility companies, saying that utilities are not incentivized to sell less energy. “We need to change the incentive structure so they can make money saving energy,” Chuck said. He also spoke about the need for raising standards that regulate energy efficiency. Why, he asked, are buildings required to have insulation and yet it’s OK to screw in energy-sucking lights? Good question.
And when it comes to being a leader in LED lighting, Chuck didn’t shy away from telling the audience how Cree stays ahead of the pack.
“We listen to what people say we can’t do and, basically, we just go do that,” Chuck said. “It’s been a really exciting source of innovation for our company.”
So while Chuck didn’t dish out any ice cream, he definitely served up some inspiration. But you don’t have to take my word on it. People who were at the event and/or reading Tweets from the event felt the same way:
A big thank you to the folks who organized this year’s N.C. CEO Forum. And if you were inspired to learn more about the LED Lighting Revolution, you can do it here.
On Earth Day we’re celebrating our efforts to spread energy-efficient LED lighting. Here’s the story behind the March Cree LED lighting contest winner. You can celebrate Earth Day by submitting a photo for a chance to win five Cree LED lights in our April giveaway.
To say that Gary Bradley’s passion depends on good lighting would be an understatement. Gary is a plein air painter, who spends much of his creative time on location, painting landscapes and buildings on 8×10 canvases. When he’s finished with his small paintings, he takes them back to his Raleigh, NC, studio and paints a larger picture.
Once he’s back indoors, the lighting struggle begins:
“As a painter, one of the things that you have difficulties with is getting lighting in an interior studio,” Gary said. “You end up with all these shadows and the lighting is uneven, especially with fluorescents. So you have to put cool light in and warm light in.”
But Gary is about to win his battle against uneven lighting. Gary is the winner of Cree’s March LED lighting contest. He won five Cree LR6 recessed LED lights, which he plans to install in the studio he is building in his new home. Here’s his winning photo entry:
Gary’s new Cree LED downlights will cast a warm, even light in his new studio. And, when I called Gary to chat about his prize, he pointed out another perk to the lights he won – they don’t contain toxic mercury like the fluorescents he was using.
“In the art world, we work with a lot of materials that are toxins, so you try to find different ways to be friendly to the environment,” Gary said, adding that he likes that LED lights are mercury free.
It was good chatting with Gary and learning about his passion for painting. He left me with this thoughtful quote.
“We live in a world where a lot of things are broken,” Gary said. “The environment is broken, personal relationships are broken, so people need beauty to heal themselves. Art is one of the ways we express beauty.”
Want me to write about you next month? Enter the April LED lighting giveaway for your chance to win five Cree LED lights. To enter the contest, simply submit a photo of bad lighting in your home, office, studio, or wherever you spend your poorly lit days. Happy Earth Day!
It’s not easy to make an LED light. Designers have to consider a lot of factors in their fixture designs including chip selection, LED packaging, color mixing, optics, electronics, thermals, oh my.
But we’re making it easier for manufacturers to overcome the common design issues they’ve faced when trying to incorporate LED solutions into their lighting fixtures.
Today we announced the launch of Cree LED Module LMR4. This module can make it easier for designers to create LED lights of their own, which means ultimately it can lead to even more energy-efficient LED lights on the market.
More LED lights means it will be easier to help people break their fluorescent shackles and incandescent cuffs. It means there will be even more opportunities to bring energy-efficient, beautiful LED light into homes, offices, businesses and other places that need to be enlightened.
How can this LED lighting module help? Well, since the module contains the LED light, heat sink and driver electronics, designers can just drop this unit into their designs. This helps take some of the burden off of lighting fixture manufacturers that are interested in developing LED lights but just don’t have the experience. This can help speed up the time it takes manufacturers to develop and produce LED lights of their own, which means we can all buy them sooner. Fixture design becomes faster and easier.
And, the big bonus, is that this module produces beautiful, warm white light using Cree TrueWhite™ technology. That means designers who use this module will get access to the same light used in Cree’s fixtures. They won’t have to reinvent the wheel (or the light, as it may be).
Watch this brief 1-minute video to see some more details about the new Cree module. Please note my awesome hand modeling skills:
This time last year, all eyes were on Chapel Hill, NC, after the Tar Heels secured the Men’s NCAA Basketball Championship. Fans filled Franklin Street, celebrating the win in true Tar Heel style, by taking the fun to the streets.
Many of us watched the revelry from the comfort of our couches. On TV, we saw thousands of students and fans dotting the main drag through Chapel Hill, cheering and jumping over fires. At Cree, we watched intently for other reasons.
About a week before the championship game, ten high-pressure sodium (HPS) streetlights on Franklin Street were replaced with LED streetlights. The orange glow cast by the HPS streetlights was cast aside and the white light produced by the new LED streetlights helped make colors pop.
The LED streetlights were installed in the 100 block of Franklin Street where students and residents gather to celebrate events like Halloween and big Tar Heel wins.
Flickr user benuski posted this picture of Franklin Street during the 2009 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship celebration. Note the orange glow from the HPS streetlight.
Since the LED streetlights help make colors pop, it was easy to see which section of Franklin Street featured the energy-saving LED lights and which section was still stuck with the dimmer HPS streetlights. In the LED-lit section, you could actually see the Carolina blue T-shirts Tar Heel fans were rocking. In the HPS-lit section, it just looked like a dingy, orangey mob with some semblance of blue mixed in.
Take a look for yourself in this time-lapse video The Daily Tar Heel produced of the Franklin Street celebration last year. You’ll see the LED-lit side of the street on the left and the dingy HPS-lit side on the right:
