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.