I’ve been writing this blog for over 2 years, and my intent has always been to review lighting products for use at home. When I started, I wrote about things like book lights and bulbs for Maglite flashlights, because that was all there was. But I knew these niche applications were important stepping stones and sources of revenues that would fund further R&D and product development to bring LEDs to mainstream. I believe that time is coming now.

Holiday lighting is one of the first real applications that I have seen, as I noted in this post. And in this NY Times blog post Home Depot is quoted noting a “triple-digit increase” in sales of LED holiday lights this year; it also notes that LEDs will account for about 25 – 50% of sales this year.

This forecast comes from a semi-conductor analyst company, iSuppli, which forecast a couple of weeks ago that the LED market will show 18% CAGR growth from now through 2013, to become a $14.6 billion market. They note that “LED light bulbs will address the residential and enterprise general illumination market in 2010.” Their report lists 17 applications for LEDs and I suspect the greater part of this growth is in applications like computer displays, televisions, mobile devices, etc.

But Siemens, owners of Osram-Sylvania,  is also bullish on LED lights, and appears to be quoting this research in their recent press release. (On the other hand, this also appears to be a case of trying to put lipstick on the pig of the poor results of this division — they go to great pains to make the case that Osram is the second-largest maker of LEDs and it is not a stretch to say that they are betting on turning around this division based on the growth of LEDs). They also fielded their own survey which reported that 12% of consumers have tried LED lighting — seems a stretch unless consumers are aware that the light in their booklights, flashlights, and nightlights are LED.

But Sylvania is getting more aggressive in the LED market, being the provider for the lighting the the all-LED Star Market that opened recently in suburban Massachusetts. (A competitor I recently spoke with derided this as a “science experiment”, implying that Sylvania doesn’t offer the range of products that are used in the store. Perhaps — but the learning from this experience will give Sylvania a much-needed jumpstart to general illumination applications).

Not only does the lighting in the Star Market use all LEDs, but Sylvania used this opportunity to put some of their replacement bulbs on the shelves. To this point, they have limited their products to some niche items but it appears they are beginning to follow Philips’ retail entry at Home Depot.

2010 will see more press releases of showcase lighting installations and more products reaching the shelves. But I don’t foresee massive adoption in 2010 — next year will be the year of testing and waiting until the price/performance equation improves.

Philips LED lights in Home Depot, Waltham MA

The photo in that post was from a Home Depot in Watertown MA. I have since seen similar displays at stores in Norwood and Waltham.

Clearly, Philips is staking out shelf space as the first-to-market. But are the products ready for prime time? Will this pioneer strategy give them first mover advantage or backfire if the products don’t meet consumer expectations? I expressed some doubts in my last post and have now bought a couple of the bulbs to try out. Stay tuned for the reviews!

Philips LED lights, Norwood MA

Which raises the question: should you buy LED Christmas lights this year?

My advice: yes, just look for the color temperature in the 3000 – 3500k range.

I’ve talked to a few people who purchased LED Christmas lights a couple of years ago and hate the bluish light. I bought a couple sets of those strings, too, but now LED lights with a much more pleasing, incandescent-like yellowish glow are available (see picture).

Comparing "cool" (left) and "warm" LED Christmas lights

In my front hall, I have these two fake trees to fill the tall space. When I replaced the incandescent strings on them with LED, at first they were the bluish light on the left. When I changed them out for newer “warmer” light on the right, I took this picture for the comparison.

I have found a 60 watt replacement that is reasonably priced at $19.95. It is a 5.5 watt tube light and is so bright you can’t look at it. I got it from Super Bright. http://superbrightleds.com/edison_globe.html  part #E27-W35HF-T. If that isn’t bright enough for you, there is a 100 watt equivalent that I purchased from Luminosity, http://luminosityled.com/products/index.php/led-household-lightbulbs.html  for $36.79. It is 8.2 watts. These will really light up a room.

Thanks, Warren! I’ll be sure to check them out.

For those of you inclined to the numbers, let’s say you replace a bulb that is lit 4 hours per day with the above bulbs:

• The 60-watt equivalent will save 79.6 kilowatt hours, or almost $12 at electricity rate of $.15 per kwh. Here in Massachusetts, rates are closer to $.20 so I would save almost $15.
• The 100 watt equivalent will save 134 kwh, $20 at $.15 per kwh and nearly $27 for me.

Another way to put it is each of these bulbs will pay back the initial cost in under 2 years, but since they are likely to last at least 7 years (10,000 hours) they will save a lot of money over the lifetime.

Now that cfl’s have come down to the sub $10 range (and I often see them in the sub $5 range) I don’t think these prices are mass market yet. But they are close enough that early adopters will buy them, starting the feedback look that will increase volume and lower costs, prove the market, attract more competition, further lower prices, spur more demand, etc.

Perhaps the L-Prize , with its more modest goal of replacing a 60-watt bulb with a 10-watt LED, won’t be the primary kickstart to the market.

Will this bulb win the L-Prize?

This NY Times article give Philips the pole position for this $10 million prize. Win or lose, it is great for LED lighting.The Department of Energy launched the L-Prize a year ago to spur development of a light bulb that would do everything that today’s 60-watt incandescent does, but for only 10 watts. Apparently, they have learned lessons from the chaos of the introduction of CFLs,  and the poor consumer perception that these bulbs still suffer from.

But this prize can also trace its ancestry to the Super Efficient Refrigerator Prize of 1992. Utility companies put up a $20 million prize for a better refrigerator which Whirlpool delivered. While that specific model was not the success Whirlpool and the sponsors hoped it would be, it set the entire industry on a path that has resulted in decreasing the energy use of refrigerators by 60%, with improvements continuing.

Given the start of the science in LED lighting, this could be just the nudge the industry needs to bring LED lighting to the mainstream. Philips is trying to get there but the products they have introduced into retail still fall short of the bulbs they are trying to replace (see my post from a couple of weeks ago).

Applause to the DOE for this imaginative use of carrots instead of sticks to accelerate a new technology!

A couple of the points that stand out for me are:

• OLEDs allow completely new types of lighting because they can be used in sheets and even bent. The article speculates about venetian blinds or even windows themselves that are sheet of OLED. More likely are the lighted ceiling panels by Armstrong World Industries that would presumably fit any existing drop ceiling. 
• The qualityof light may take some getting used to. Pros: very uniform and even, likened in the article to the room looking as if the sun is still streaming in, even at night. Cons: monotonous, “missing the spiritual side” as one designer is quoted in the article.
• All the majors — GE, Philips, Osram-Sylvania — are putting big bucks in OLED.
• The first products are scheduled to come to market the end of next year.
• Anil Duggal, the head of GE’s OLED unit is quoted as saying, “I want to get the price down to $6 for an OLED device that gives off the same amount of light as a standard 60-watt bulb.”

That last quote is not surprising — I assume his colleagues over in the “regular” LED group are working toward the same goal. Will it be easier with OLEDs? The article says they give off almost no heat, so presumably the won’t need any heatsink which adds cost and complexity to current LED luminaires, as well as limiting their application. There’s no mention of what kind of drivers or power conditioning they need.

The opportunities are exciting. If they can truly create a sunlight-like effect, consumers will embrace them as background lighting.

The bigger short-term opportunity, it seems to me, is replacing fluorescent tube lighting. This is a big market with pretty standard size panels that would lend themselves to mass production. Because “regular” LEDs are such point sources, you need a lot of LEDs on a 4-foot array to replace a tube, hence they are – and are likely to remain — expensive.

I’ll definitely be doing more OLED posts to find out if they are as close to market as this article states.

Philips LEDs at Home Depot

Nestled among the CFLs at Home Depot were 3 Philips LED bulbs of fairly mainstream sizes. IMHO, this is bad merchandising for these products which are not ready for mainstream markets.

Here are the stats:

MR16, 4 watts, 2 color temperatures: 4100k and around 3000k, lumens not specified.

“Indoor flood”, size not specified, 7 watts, 3100k, 155 lumens.

Decorative bulb, candelabra base, 2.5 watts, 30 lumens.

I had seen the MR 16 at this Home Depot for a couple of months — over in the selection of halogen MR 16s. This was the first time I saw the flood or the candelabra bulb.

At first I was excited — here was a major brand in a major retailer with front-and-center shelf space. But as I examined the packages my enthusiasm cooled.

Price, of course, is the first deterrent to putting them in my shopping cart. At $15 – $25, it is really a non-starter.

Second, is the inconsistent labeling. The lack of lumen output or any comparison to what “regular” MR 16 bulb it would replace makes it hard to determine if it is suitable. Similarly for the flood — it is a different shape than the floods I use in most of my house (R30), so I can’t tell if this is a suitable replacement.

Third, is the lumen output. These are so low that they barely qualify as accent lights and would be so dim as to be unusable in most of my house.

For fun, I stopped at a Lowe’s and found there are not carrying any of these bulbs. They had the Sylvania “Dot It” lights, and a good selection of solar-powered landscape lights using LEDs, plus a few specialty signage/sports logo products.

It’s hard to know whether Home Depot and Philips are setting out to be leaders, or whether the lighting manager at this one store decided he would highlight these new products. Either way, this is clearly jumping the gun and risks retarding, rather than accelerating, sales as LEDs get closer to being market ready.

Either way, it is probably bad for LED lighting.

Clearly, these bulbs are only suitable for accent lighting, not general lighting. As such, they should be in a “specialty” lighting section. Otherwise, consumers will get them home, discover them to be really dim, and, like the early generation of CFLs, decide LED lighting isn’t acceptable.

It used to be so simple — just buy a light bulb. But if you want to be an LED light pioneer, you need to know a bit more about what you’ll get when you buy that bulb.

Color rendering index is much more straightforward than color temperature. For one, the name really explains what it means: how well does the light render color, ie, how close is that color that you see under the light to the actual color of the object? A 100 CRI means it is perfectly accurate compared to the reference light source.

So how should you use this in deciding on LED bulbs? First, CRI is related to color temperate so you should only compare the CRIs of two bulbs of similar color temperature. Incandescent bulbs have a color temperature of about 3000K and a CRI of 100. So if the LED is around that temperate and has a CRI of 80+, you’ll probably be pretty happy with it. (Fluorescents often have a CRI down in the 60s, which is why people feel like the light makes colors look washed out; sodium vapor streetlights can be as low as 20, which is why we all hate that deeply yellowish light).

Read on if you want a bit of the scientific background behind this.

But, you have to ask, what light source do you pick as your reference? This is where things get tricky and there is room for CRI to be misleading. Incandescents get a CRI of 100, even though, by its nature, incandescent light doesn’t do a particularly good job of rendering blues accurately. The reference used is a “black body radiator” which is explained in more detail at Wikipedia here (because incandescents work by heating a filament until it glows, they are, in essence, black body radiators hence their CRI of 100. Probably more than you wanted to know…)

Since CRI is related to color temperature, you can’t necessarily say that two light sources with the same CRI will look the same if their color temperature is vastly different.  Full Spectrum Solutions has an interesting example of how even a 90+ CRI can result in significant color distortion.

For more detail, Wikipedia has a highly technical explanation (including alternatives to the current CRI methodology that are being proposed). Also, Energy Star has this flyer specifically about CRI and LEDs.

I like the elegance of the reading glasses better, personally. But these could be very handy, too.

LED streetlights seem like a good idea, but seeing is believing. This photo, comparing LED (left) to sodium vapor lamps (right), makes a compelling case that LEDs are ready to go.

From what I read, this photo is making the circuit within the LED lighting industry. It was taken at The Prairie School in Racine Wisconsin where they decided to test half of their parking lot with LEDs from Betaled. The company offers the case study here but here is the key fact:

• The LEDs consume 141 watts vs 300 watts for the sodium vapor — savings of 53%

They also measure that the sodium vapor lights actually put out more foot candles of light, but because of the color rendering index is so poor, it looks dimmer. This spurs a controversy because apparently there are standards that require a certain number of footcandles of light that were created based on sodium and mercury vapor lamps; LEDs don’t yet match these standards. But LED’s color rendering index of 80 yield such a superior quality of light that it trumps the foot candle output.

But this isn’t just a matter of obscure standards and scientific measurements — good quality light makes a real difference. In this study sponsored by Cree, residents of Raleigh, NC surveyed before and after sodium vapor lights in a parking garage were replaced with LEDs felt safer, reported that the garage was cleaner, and felt the light quality was better with the LEDs.

As the technology improves, the barriers to LED adoption will be less and less about their performance, and more and more about overcoming these ingrained habits and obsolete standards in an industry that is slow to change.