Cree LED lights will soon light up kitchens in thousands of homes built by Habitat for Humanity. Last week Cree announced its three-year, $1.5 million pledge to Habitat for Humanity International to provide our newest LED downlight for the kitchens in all new Habitat homes built in the United States.
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.
