Today’s guest blog post is by Mark Wanless, Cree’s national accounts sales director, who is holding down our booth this week at the International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show!

One of the easiest ways for hotels, motels and restaurants to cut their energy costs is to upgrade to energy-efficient LED lighting.

We’ll be at the International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show at the Javits Center in New York City Sunday through Tuesday talking about the benefits of LED lighting. But we know not everyone will have a chance to say hi to me, Jay, Jennifer at Cree booth #2676, so I’ve compiled some key things you need to know about Cree LED lighting.

1)      Cree LED Lights Can Cut Energy Costs. If your business is still shining incandescent downlights or Halogen track lighting, you’re just burning up money.  Most of the energy emitted from incandescent bulbs (yes, Halogen bulbs are considered an incandescent light source) is converted to heat instead of light. That’s why you’ll burn yourself if you try to touch a traditional light bulb.

When the Hampton Inn-Biltmore Square in Asheville, NC, replaced its incandescent and fluorescent lighting with approximately 680 Cree LR6 LED downlights, it saved more than 300,000 kilowatts, almost half of the original lighting output, according to an analysis of the hotel’s electric bills prior to and after the renovation.

2)      Cree LED Lights Are Designed for Really Long Lifetimes. What if you could go years without having to replace a burned out light in your lobby or dining room? Most of Cree’s LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours. That means you could leave them on 24 hours a day, seven days a week and they could last more than five years!  Plus Cree’s LED lights use less energy and can last even longer when they are dimmed!

At the Hilton Garden Inn Nashville/Smyrna (pictured below) a total of 134 65-watt incandescent lights in the lobby were replaced with 134 10.5-watt Cree CR6 LED downlights. Those LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours and feature a 5-year warranty, which means the hotel maintenance crew could go nearly six years without having to replace a light!

3)      Cree LED Lights Are Dimmable. If you want to offer your guests mood lighting while they network over cocktails at the hotel bar or enjoy a romantic dinner in the restaurant dining room, dimming is key. Most of Cree’s LED lights, including our downlights and lamps, are dimmable to 5 percent. That means you can easily change the mood in a room depending on the time of day. Ever try to dim a CFL downlight? I bet it didn’t help improve the mood.

At the Courtyard by Marriott Louisville East (pictured below), hotel staff frequently dim the Cree LED lobby lighting in the evening, improving the night time atmosphere and saving even more energy.

4)      Cree LED Lights Can Cut Maintenance. Don’t believe all the light bulb jokes out there. Changing a light can be tricky if you’re running a motel or restaurant. Often you have to wait until there’s a lull in business to break out a ladder, or a lift, to change a bulb. We’ve heard stories of hotel bringing in a crew with a scissor lift in the wee hours of the morning, when lobby traffic was low, to change hard-to-reach bulbs. That’s too much trouble to have to go through on a regular basis, not to mention expensive. With long-lasting LED lights, you can cut back on lighting maintenance, freeing up your employees to focus on other more pressing tasks.

The maintenance and energy savings delivered by the Cree LED lights at several Denny’s restaurants in Colorado were so impressive that owner Pete LaBarre decided to install them outside the perimeter of the restaurants too.

5)      Cree LED Lighting is Beautiful. At Cree, we believe you shouldn’t have to choose between color quality and energy-efficient lighting. You deserve both. That’s why we invented Cree TrueWhite™ Technology, which is our patented approach to generating white light with LEDs. By mixing the light from red and unsaturated yellow LEDs, we’re able to create attractive, warm, white light that you’re used to getting with incandescent lighting.

The warm lighting is one of the reasons Denny’s Corporation chose Cree LED lights as the preferred lighting standard for all its new and remodeled stores across the United States, according to Mitch Riese, Denny’s corporate architect, senior manager of design & construction.

To learn more about LED lighting, you can contact a Cree LED lighting distributor in your area. Or if you’re going to be at the International Hotel, Motel and Restaurant Show, come meet us at booth #2676. You can even ask for me, I’m Mark!