The world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference kicks off this weekend in Philadelphia. Lightfair International is a lighting geek’s dream. Here’s a quick rundown by the numbers:
20,000: Designers, lighting, architectural, engineering and energy professionals expected to pack the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia during the trade show and conference.
170,000: Net square feet of exhibit space at Pennsylvania Convention Center
1,600: Booths that will line the trade show floor.
475: Manufactures showcasing products at the trade show.
200: Hours of accredited courses provided during the conference
24: Total hours the trade show floor will be open over three days
1925: Cree’s booth number
Yep, that’s right, our booth number is 1925. For those of you in attendance, we hope to see you there.
For those of you who won’t be there, stick around here. We’ll be posting updates throughout the week right here! Stay tuned!
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.
Seeing is believing when it comes to lighting. So if the folks at Indiana-based Grote Industries sent you an e-mail saying their LED work lamps were stunning, it probably wouldn’t have the same impact as if they set up the lights in your driveway and switched them on.
So Grote is taking its new LED WhiteLight Work Lamps to the streets, literally. Earlier this month, Grote hit the highway for an 80-plus city tour in a truck adorned with LED-loving Super Heroes dubbed Team Trilliant, named after the company’s Trilliant LED WhiteLight Technology. Take a look:
This truck features 34 exterior work lamps all lit with Cree X-Lamp® XR-E LEDs. The tricked out truck will travel west across the northern United States and parts of Canada this summer then head south during its return leg in the fall and winter, according to a Grote press release.
It’s definitely a different way for a manufacturer of vehicle safety systems to reach its audience. Grote officials say they redirected resources traditionally aimed at industry trade shows to pursue the tour. The tour also features a mobile theater, giving visitors a chance to learn more about the advantages of LED work lights where ever the truck stops.
A restaurant with bad lighting is a bummer. Bad lighting can kill the mood and even make food look discolored. Customers can leave unimpressed. Owners could be stuck with expensive electric bills and a restaurant that has a bad lighting reputation.
So I wasn’t surprised to read this article in the New York Times, which declares that “a lot of thought and expense go into restaurant lighting,” particularly at upscale restaurants.
But what I was surprised to read is that some restaurant owners in New York City are harkening back to Thomas Edison’s heyday and installing antique-looking, energy-wasting reproductions of Edison’s first light bulb.
There is no excuse for this. And believe me, I’m all about beautiful design and I even support being trendy from time-to-time.
Photo by Flickr user back_garage
Sure, these retro-looking filament-filled lights have a charming appearance, but they consume more energy than standard incandescent light bulbs. And since restaurants leave their lights running for many hours a day, those vintage-looking bulbs are sucking a lot of energy and driving up utility bills. Not to mention putting out enough collective heat to have a real impact on air conditioning needs!
Restaurant owners who are serving up these Edison reproductions say the lights are a bit nostalgic and the warm light is flattering. To that I say: Perhaps you need a more creative lighting designer. Have they seen some of the unique lighting designs that incorporate LEDs?
On a regular basis, the green design blog Inhabitat posts some of the most incredible energy-efficient LED lighting designs your imagination could conjure up. Among them are:
I mean seriously, if designers can create LED lights out of soap, imagine what they could do for an upscale restaurant in New York City?
These beautiful glass pendant lights are lit with energy-efficient Cree LEDs.
Sure, creating a custom LED light fixture for a restaurant might not be as cheap as buying an incandescent bulb. But the energy and maintenance savings from LED lights can quickly add up. And perhaps these restaurants will attract even more diners who are wooed by both beautiful lighting AND energy-efficiency. With LED lights, you can have both.
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!
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):
“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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having your own office is pretty sweet. You get a door that you can close while you’re at work. An office provides a level of privacy many cubicle dwellers crave. So what if your cube was turned into your office? You’d probably be pretty happy, right? That’s what happened to Mark Wickman, who works for the nonprofit Opportunity Council in Washington.
Mark is the winner of the December Cree LED Lighting photo contest, winning five LED lights for his office. In Mark’s photo, he showed off his new office, which used to be two cubes, but they were torn out and converted into an office. The new construction meant he was “escaping dreary fluorescent ceiling tube fixtures” outside his office, but he really wanted some energy-efficient LED lights for his new digs.
Mark is the production manager for the weatherization department at the Opportunity Council, a nonprofit that helps homeless and low-income families learn to become self-sufficient. I asked him to describe the lighting in his office now and he wrote: “mostly ceiling fluorescent tubes – dreary – with a few CFLs which provide no better light quality.”
Mark says the only LED lighting he’s ever tried before was in Christmas lights, flashlights and his bike light. I can’t wait until Mark screws in his new Cree LED lights. He chose our LRP-38 lamps (see photo below), which have a color rendering index (CRI) of 92. The CRI characterizes light sources ability to render colors accurately and can be between 0 and 100. A higher CRI means that colors are more true and the light is perceived as more pleasant. The CRI of fluorescent tubes is often around 72. So Mark is in for a change!
A couple of other facts about Mark’s new LED lights … The Cree LRP-38 lamps are designed to last 50,000 hours. That means they could last 17 years if he keeps the lights on 8 hours a day, 7 days a week! And each LRP-38 uses 12 Watts of energy, but provides the equivalent light of a 50 to 90 Watt halogen bulb. So his new lights will also consume significantly less energy than traditional lighting!
Are you starting to get jealous of Mark? Don’t bother. Just snap a photo of bad lighting in your home or office and enter our January contest. We’ll be giving away five more energy-efficient Cree LED lights at the end of the month. You could win next!
The LED Revolution is happening all around the country. We’ve been sharing some great examples of the forefathers of the revolution here.
I think it’s important that we show off some of the places where you can find LED lighting so you can see that it’s truly happening. So take a look at this LED lighting installation at Furniture Row in Denver, Colorado.
One of our lighting guys took a flip cam with him and interviewed a store manager about the lights. I love this video because you can tell the manager is sincerely pleased with the energy savings he expects his LED lights.
