Cree LED Revolution Blog

Cree and LED lighting are starting a revolution

Posts Tagged ‘LED home lighting’

Cree LED Contest Series: Family no longer hangs out in the dark

Monday, July 18th, 2011


We’re strong believers that if people can see quality LED lighting in action, they’ll want it. That’s because quality LED lighting is beautiful, very energy efficient, and can last a long time. What’s not to love?

So when we first launched our LED education portal, CreeLEDRevolution.com, we set out to makeover poorly-lit spaces through a monthly photo contest. The idea was to end the oppression of inferior lighting (or at least make a dent in it).

Since then we’ve awarded more than 100 Cree LED lights to homeowners and office workers from coast to coast. We followed up with the lucky winners to find out where they ended up using their Cree LED lights and what they think of them.

This week we will be highlighting follow-up interviews from some of the winners we heard back from. So stay tuned to our blog all week for stories from these LED revolutionaries. Here’s what you can expect:

TODAY: We check-in on our July 2010 winner who has developed a love for Cree LED lights.

TUESDAY: We see how the October 2010 winner made over his office and how a bathroom went from spooky to smiley.

WEDNESDAY: We revisit an energy professional who is using his LED lighting from the December 2010 contest to spread the good word.

THURSDAY: It’s not all about residential lighting. We revisit the February 2010 who shows us what LED lighting can do in a retail space.

FRIDAY: We’ll show you how LED lighting can even help a plein air painter. Confused? Stay tuned to see what our March 2010 winner did.

And if you want to be a winner too, hurry up and enter our July photo contest.

Entering is simple, just submit a photo of poor lighting in your home or office. Maybe you have CFLs that make everything in your kitchen look ghastly. Or maybe those incandescent lights in the den are sucking up too much energy and putting out too much heat. Each month our judges select one winner (and occasionally a runner-up) to receive five Cree CR6 LED downlights.

But you can’t win if you don’t enter. Submit your photo here. And read the full rules here.

And now, find out how winning our contest is changing the way one Idaho family lights its home:

July 2010 Winner Jerry Saltzer

It has been a year since Jerry Saltzer won our LED lighting giveaway, and in that time his love for LED lighting has grown so much that he has purchased eight more Cree LED lights.

“About half the canisters in the house are now equipped with Cree LEDs and I plan gradually to replace the rest,” Jerry wrote to me in a recent follow-up email.

That’s great news considering Jerry and his family were avoiding turning on lights in the living room and office because it was too much of a pain to change them when they burned out. The Idaho family won the July 2010 LED lighting giveaway after submitting this photo and explaining:

Jerry entered this photo to Cree's LED Lighting Contest.

Jerry entered this photo to Cree's LED Lighting Contest.

“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.”

Now the family doesn’t have to worry about that. In addition to replacing the energy-wasting incandescent downlights in his living room and office, Jerry says he has installed four Cree CR6 LED downlights in his kitchen. He has also installed four Cree LBR30 LED lamps in his stairwells.

And while it probably wasn’t oodles of fun dragging out the ladder to installing all of these new LED lights, Jerry gets to look on the bright side. Since his new Cree LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours, he shouldn’t have to worry about changing these lights for years, even decades, to come.

If you want to put away your ladder for a long time, enter our July LED lighting photo contest. Simply submit a photo of poor lighting in your home or office that you would like to get rid of for good. One lucky winner will receive five Cree CR6 LED downlights.

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Posted in Contest Winners, Cree, Revolution | 5 Comments »

February Cree LED lighting contest winner is giving his kitchen a lighting makeover

Thursday, April 7th, 2011


Paul Mason is remodeling his kitchen, which means he finally gets to ditch the ugly, three-light CFL fixture in the center of the room.

Paul, of Dearborn, Michigan, is the winner of the February Cree LED lighting photo contest. He gets five Cree CR6 LED downlights to replace the ugly (his words, not ours) lighting in his kitchen.

Feb 2011 Contest Winner

When I wrote Paul to see if he had ever used LED lighting before, he responded that he has some LED under cabinet lighting from IKEA and one LED light bulb. We’re pretty sure our CR6 LED downlights are going to knock his socks off. Here’s what he said about his current kitchen lighting:

“I have two applications for the CR6 bulbs, both over my sink and for general lighting throughout my kitchen.  I like the even, warm light and very low heat generation.  Our current fixture generated way too much heat with incandescent bulbs, and the light quality of the CFL’s currently installed is just poor, so I’m looking forward to fixing both with your bulbs!”

The lights he won consume only 10.5 Watts and can replace a 65 watt incandescent light. Since Paul is upgrading from CFLs, he’ll probably immediately notice that his new LED lights deliver warmer light and come to full brightness instantly. No more waiting for his CFLs to warm up. He’ll also have the option to dim them down to 5 percent, nothing like having the option of mood lighting.

And Paul should also be able to go a long time without replacing another bulb in his kitchen. Since the CR6 LED downlight is designed to last 50,000 hours, he could leave his new kitchen lights on for eight hours a day, seven days a week and he could go more than 17 years without replacing them. Pretty incredible, huh?

Are you jealous of Paul’s new lights? Don’t be. Submit a photo of the lighting you would like to replace in your home or office to our monthly photo contest. Each month we give away five energy-efficient Cree CR6 LED downlights. To enter, submit your photo here. Or, if you can’t wait that long, find out how you can go get them right now.

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Posted in Cree, Revolution | 3 Comments »

September Cree LED lighting contest winner to prove naysayers wrong

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

Michigan resident Carol Thompson wanted to try LED lighting – or so she thought. But then someone told her that “the color spectrum was altered and they didn’t light too well.” Curious Carol didn’t let speculation stand in her way. She set off to Google the prospects of LED lighting.

“I found the information quite contrary to what I had been told,” Carol told me in an email.

Her quest to find out the truth about LED lighting led her to our contest. She submitted a photo of the lonely recessed light in her home office. Carol is the September winner of our LED lighting giveaway. She wins five Cree CR6™ LED downlights.

Here's the photo Carol submitted in our September contest.

Here's the photo Carol submitted in our September contest.

Here’s what Carol is going to find out when she installs her new lights. They deliver beautiful light, providing the quality you would expect from an incandescent. And her new lights won’t slurp up a lot of energy. Each CR6 LED downlight only consumes 10.5 Watts, and can replace a 65 Watt incandescent light. (Yes, the time has come to say goodbye to those Halogen lights warming up the cans in your ceiling.)

Carol’s new lights provide warm light (2700K for those of you in-the-know) and they’re dimmable to 5 percent. Bonus: She’ll use even less energy when the lights are dimmed.

And, Carol’s new Cree LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours, which means they could last more than 17 years if she leaves them on for eight hours a day, seven days a week. It’s a good thing too, because Carol says the office lights are on a lot because her husband works at home.

When she installs her new CR6 LED downlights, she should invite over the person who told her that LEDs don’t make good lighting. We’d love to be there when she flips the switch so we can see their surprised look and hear her offer a big “neener-neener-neener” under her breath.

Congratulations, Carol! If you want to prove any LED lighting skeptics in your life wrong with Cree LED lights, enter our November contest for your chance to win five Cree CR6 LED downlights. And if you just can’t wait, look up a distributor near you.

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Posted in For Fun | No Comments »

Cree breaks ground on the world’s first LED-lit Habitat for Humanity home

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Today we’re breaking ground on the world’s first Habitat for Humanity House lit entirely with LED lights. Cree employees are working with the Habitat for Humanity of Durham to build the home over the next three months. Cree is sponsoring the construction of the home, which will include our newest LED recessed light, the CR6™ downlight, as well as other LED products featuring Cree LEDs.

The LED lighting in this house is projected to save approximately $250 worth of electricity costs per year over traditional lighting. When it’s complete, this home will be a true example of the energy savings you can achieve when you ditch Edison’s ancient technology for energy-efficient LEDs.

The Durham home that we’re helping to build is part of Cree’s previously announced three-year, $1.5 million pledge to provide its high-efficiency LED downlights for all new Habitat homes built in the U.S. We hope to finish construction by October 2011.

This is the vacant site in Durham where Cree's Habitat for Humanity house will be built.

This is the vacant site in Durham where Cree's Habitat for Humanity house will be built.

We’re so excited to help build the first Habitat home lit solely with LED lights. The CR6 downlight will be one of the primary fixtures in the home. It’s a 10.5 Watt light that delivers warm light and is dimmable to 5 percent. It’s designed to last 50,000 hours, which means the family that moves into this home could leave the CR6 lights on for eight hours a day, seven days a week and the lights could last more than 17 years!

I’ll keep you posted on construction.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

North Dakota homeowner is happy his Cree LED lights don’t have “Star Wars light saber effect”

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

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):

DaveHultinKitchen

DaveHultin2

DaveHultinHallwayupstairs

DaveHultinPianoRoom

“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.

You can read more about Dave’s experience finding and trying out Cree lights on his blog.

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Posted in LED Homes | 8 Comments »