Cree is celebrating Energy Awareness Month with a series of blog posts about ways Cree and our products are helping save energy.
To help you become more energy aware, we’re going to drop some knowledge on you with what’s coming up in the wild and crazy world of lighting. As we’ve shared with you before here and here, beginning in 2012, you are going to start seeing new packaging and labeling on all household bulbs. The idea is that this information will help you save money by selecting the most efficient bulbs that fit all of your lighting needs.
Check this out…
Does that help? If not, maybe this breaks it down a little better…
Basically, forget everything you thought about when buying lighting products. Yup, everything. Erase it from your memory. You used to buy on watts, which measures the amount of energy required to illuminate lighting products. But with more energy-efficient lighting available, like Cree’s EcoSmart LED Downlight, you need to buy your lighting based on lumens, which measures the amount of light produced.
The more lumens, the brighter the light. For example:
40-watt incandescent bulb = 450 lumens
60-watt incandescent bulb = 800 lumens
100-watt incandescent bulb = 1600 lumens
“Nutrition” Labels
Similar to the nutrition labels that you find on your food packaging, the new labels that will be coming in 2012 will have concise information about the bulb’s output and savings.
Cree labels include:
Brightness (in lumens)
Estimated Yearly Energy Cost
Life-expectancy of the bulb
Light appearance and
Energy used
What Cree labels won’t include – Contains Mercury. That’s right, those other energy-efficient bulbs, you know the ones, the twisty-twirly CFLs contain mercury and will have to disclose that on their labels.
So now that you’ve been educated and you know how to shop, go out and get your Cree LED Lighting!
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.
It’s not often that thousands of people get together just to celebrate a street. But that’s exactly what will be happening Saturday in Raleigh, NC, when the city hosts a street celebration festival for Hillsborough Street.
The “Live It Up” Street Opening Celebration is meant to unite neighbors, business owners, students and other Raleigh residents to salute the recently-renovated street. And while most eyes will probably be on the performers, beer garden and farmers market set up to celebrate, we lighting geeks will be looking up at the new LED street and pedestrian lights that have been installed.
LED street lights shine down on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, NC, adjacent to North Carolina State University.
The city of Raleigh replaced the energy-wasting metal halide lights that used to line the street with energy-efficient LED lighting manufactured by BetaLED, a Wisconsin-based company that uses Cree LEDs in its lights. Here’s what got replaced:
15 metal halide street lights consuming 370 Watts each were replaced with 15 183-Watt LED street lights.
40 metal halide street lights consuming 289 Watts a piece were replaced with 40 79-Watt LED street lights.
85 metal halide streetlights consuming 190 Watts each were replaced with 85 55-Watt LED pedestrian lights.
In addition to saving energy and maintenance costs, the new LED lights have also improved visibility for pedestrians and drivers, says Bob Henderson, technical lighting consultant for Progress Energy, the city’s energy provider.
City officials had to jump through some hoops to get the LED street lights installed, including convincing the North Carolina Department of Transportation (which owns the road) that it was the right move. Raleigh’s Assistant City Manager Dan Howe talks about the process in this video:
Howe says the city is going to continue to evaluate LED street lighting.
“We’ve done a couple of little pilot projects and they were successful, but this is a major public corridor and it’s working,” Howe said. “So what we’re going to try to do from this point out is to test the viability of LED lighting in a variety of street light settings around the city: Residential street lights, commercial streets in industrial areas, commercial streets in downtown and some other retail areas.”
Howe said the city still has a bit to learn about things like proper spacing of lights, the best height for the poles and more, but that these test installations will help the city determine some best practices before tackling even bigger street lighting projects.
The difference with the LED street lights on the right is obvious. The LED lights provide clean, white light compared to the orange high pressure sodium lights on the right.
I used to live on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. And each May, the locals worked hard to teach tourists the importance of leaving lights off during loggerhead sea turtle nesting season. The “Keep Lights Out for Loggerheads” campaign would get so embedded in my mind that, like a catchy song on the radio, I sometimes found myself mumbling “Lights Out for Loggerheads” under my breath.
What the islanders know that many tourists don’t realize is that artificial light can throw off loggerheads when they come ashore to deposit their eggs. Artificial light can also throw off loggerhead hatchlings because it can steer them away from the ocean.
So when I found out the City of Bradenton Beach, Florida was installing LED street lights approved by the Florida Wildlife Commission as turtle-friendly, my heart sang a little. Located on Anna Maria Island along the Gulf of Mexico, the City of Bradenton Beach recently replaced 100-Watt high pressure sodium street lights with decorative 17-Watt LED fixtures along Gulf Drive, the city’s main thoroughfare.
The city’s new LED street lights by Beacon Products use amber LEDs, which are visible to us humans, but are nearly undetectable to sea turtles and other marine wildlife, according to Beacon. Combine that with special optics and a full-cutoff luminaire, and you have turtle-friendly and dark sky-friendly lighting.
It’s still important for coastal residents and tourists to be mindful of their light usage during sea turtle nesting season. But we’re excited that LED lighting innovations are making it easier.
You know the lighting in your home isn’t working for you when you intentionally avoid turning the lights on. That’s what Jerry Saltzer has been doing in his home’s living room and office for some time. Instead, he relies on floor and table lamps to illuminate the areas. How come?
“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.”
Jerry wins five Cree LR6™ LED Downlights, which he plans to install in his living room. The LR6 downlight consumes only 10.5 Watts and delivers the warm light of a 65 Watt incandescent light. And Jerry’s new LED lights are designed to last 50,000 hours, which means he won’t have to deal with the hassle of swapping out his living room lights for years to come.
“Installing LED lights with an expected lifetime of 50,000 hours means that we can turn them on every evening and yet probably won’t need to change them until 2050,” Jerry wrote.
Have you ever stood in the lighting aisle at the store and picked out a bulb based on the wattage, only to come home, screw it in and see that it was way brighter (or dimmer) than you expected? It’s an easy mistake to make, especially when you’re buying energy-efficient lighting.
Under the proposed change, the front of a bulb’s package would list the brightness in lumens and the estimated energy cost per year. Flip the package over, and you would find a “lighting facts” label that includes details on life expectancy, color appearance (warm to cool) and energy use in watts, under the proposal. The labels would also require acknowledging whether bulbs have mercury (CFLs contain mercury, but LEDs don’t). Take a look at the proposed changes here:
Those of us who grew up with incandescent bulbs knew that an average 75 Watt bulb was going to be about twice as bright as a 40 Watt bulb, even though light output is measured by lumens and not watts. But since energy-efficient lights like CFLs and LEDs produce more light while using less energy, you can’t really judge their brightness based on their wattage.
Now, it’s important to note that we’re not currently putting that 186 lumen per Watt LED in a light bulb. But our business is basically built on the premise that it’s possible to produce bright light while saving energy.
But back to the bulbs…as traditional incandescent bulbs are phased out, it will become increasingly important to make sure consumers understand how the new energy-efficient lighting they’re buying will perform. That’s also why I blog about issues like this. The more you know about LED lighting, the better!
And for those who think LED lights will never be viable, definitely take a look at the full report the FTC made on the proposed label changes. Among the many bright spots for LEDs in the report is this: “The Commission believes that labeling for LED bulbs is likely to assist consumers in their purchasing decisions because they are substitutes for incandescent and CFLs and are likely to become increasingly available for household use.”
Coincidentally, one of our Twitter followers recently asked us why bulbs aren’t measured in lumens v. Watts:
Well, @Chris_Gammell, we hope this post helps answer your question! If you need more details, check out this post by Jim Brodrick, who oversees Solid State Lighting for the Department of Energy, about the proposed change.
What do you think about the FTC proposal to change the way labels look? Do you think this will make buying a light bulb easier?
