Following a preliminary installation at the museum beginning in October 2010 and involving multiple manufacturers, Solais Lighting’s 18 Watt PAR 30 Long-Neck LED lamps with 10°, 25°, and 40° beam spread successfully met performance objectives and were selected from a wide field of competitors to participate in next-tier testing, the outcomes of which will be officially monitored by the Department of Energy through the installation’s appointment as a DOE Solid State Lighting GATEWAY Demonstration Project.

Solais Lighting’s PAR30 LED lamps are currently being evaluated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for their performance in a permanent collection gallery which displays more than a dozen early modernist artworks and a mural by Thomas Hart Benton. Within the room, which features 15-16 foot ceilings, the museum aims to upgrade to a high quality, long-lasting, and more energy-efficient light source than the technology previously installed and is testing the LED lamps’ ability to light the walls flatly and achieve a broad distribution of light on the floors while spotlighting the artwork precisely.

According to Naomi Miller, Senior Lighting Engineer within the Energy and Environment Division at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, “performance criteria include beam spread, color appearance, light output, and the absence of UV or IR that could damage artwork without providing any visual benefit, as well as how the LED lamps fit into the museum’s existing track heads and deliver the desired effect.” As part of the DOE’s GATEWAY initiative, the lamps’ performance will be tracked and documented at several different points over their lifespan.

Solais Lighting’s PAR30 Long-Neck lamps combine the long life and outstanding energy efficiency of LEDs with the high output and intensity of halogen technology, resulting in a high-performance product ideal for track and recessed applications within commercial, museum, retail, hospitality and residential settings. Delivering a CRI of 82 and sporting a rated average life of 50,000 hours, the lamps are fully dimmable, free of hazardous substances such as lead and mercury, and are ETL-certified (certified to UL Standard 1993) and RoHS-compliant.

“We’re delighted to have been selected to participate in such an elite lighting test within one of the most prestigious and discriminating applications in the world,” said James Leahy, president of Solais Lighting. “Through the unique thermal management capabilities enabled by our Luxiance technology, Solais offers the lightest and best-performing LED lamps on the market, delivering superior light quality and higher light output than passively-cooled LED lamps with bulky metal heat sinks. We’re excited to be recognized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for our cutting-edge lighting technology and to be in consideration for supporting the lighting performance and environmental goals of this national treasure.”

First discovered in the 1920s, LEDs – light-emitting diodes – are semiconductors that convert electricity into light.

The research team, led by Christian Wetzel, professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, etched a nanoscale pattern at the interface between the LED’s sapphire base and the layer of gallium nitride (GaN) that gives the LED its green color.

LED lighting company Cree is taking on the overhead fluorescent lights that are a fixture of office buildings with a light source it says will quickly recoup the investment.

The company today announced a new line of “architectural troffers,” or rectangular-shaped fixtures designed for overhead lighting. The troffers use Cree’s LED light sources, which offer a longer life and improved efficiency over fluorescent lights, according to the company.

Cree LED light sources in the overhead fixtures.

The fixtures offer a white light with an efficiency of 110 lumens per watt and a color rendering index, a measure of light quality, of 90. The lights can be dimmed and are designed to last 50,000 hours, which would be more than 10 years at 12 hours a day. The fixtures have a thermal management system designed for long life.

Design services company O’Brien/Atkins Associates said in a statement that the measuring efficiency over the full product life cycle, including sizing, heating and cooling, and disposal, can be cut lighting costs by 60 percent.

Using the national average for electricity prices of 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, Cree calculates that the payoff of office upgrades to LEDs can be less than one year to replace typical fluorescent tubes. Because of the higher upfront cost of LED lighting technology, consumer adoption of LED bulbs is expected to be slower than that of commercial customers.

Strategies Unlimited predicted that the global market for LED light fixtures would grow to $8.3 billion (£5.1 billion), up from £3.8 billion in 2010.

This represents a compound annual growth rate of 22 per cent.

The report listed a number of factors driving increased take-up of LED lighting.

They included improvements in the performance and price of commercially available LEDs and growing awareness of the importance of energy efficiency.

Fiscal stimulus measures undertaken by numerous countries and the phasing out of incandescent light bulbs have also played a part.

Meanwhile, lighting designer Victoria Lee has predicted that the LED lighting market will grow with “reckless abandon” in the year ahead.

“LEDs are getting so much better, and the market is flooded with them so there are so many to choose from,” she remarked.

Rapid Electronics is a leading supplier of LEDs and optoelectronic components, and the main UK distributor of Kingbright LEDs.

The University of California at Irvine last week published results of a study into the materials used for LEDs in Christmas tree lights and car brake lights and headlights. After crushing these types of lights, researchers measured the contents and found they contained varying amounts of toxic materials, including lead and arsenic.

“What our study showed clearly was that some LED lights qualify as hazardous waste, depending on color and light intensity, according to federal (US EPA) regulations, and State (California) regulations. The red, low intensity fixtures that we tested exceeded lead (Pb) standards for California regulation by about 8 times, and exceed the federal regulations by about 35 times,” said Oladele Ogunseitan, chair of UC Irvine’s Department of Population Health & Disease Prevention via e-mail.

Right now, these products are not classified as hazardous waste, but Ogunseitan recommended that people dispatched to clean up vehicle collisions use protective gear. Homeowners should also wear gloves and masks in the case of clean-up. The copper used in some LEDs can pose health hazards to river and lake ecosystems as well if disposed of in a landfill.

Ogunseitan said that the move to LED lighting is a case in which there should be mandatory product replacement testing. He claims that the potential environmental health impacts were not sufficiently tested before manufacturers put them in products as a replacement for incandescent bulbs.

Recycling recommended for large LEDs
Large LEDs bulbs with a screw-in bottom designed for home use are just coming onto the market as replacements for 40-watt or 60-watt incandescent bulbs. In addition to good efficiency and long life, these bulbs are marketed as an improvement over compact florescent bulbs because they don’t contain mercury. CFLs can be returned to many retail stores or municipal hazardous waste handling services for recycling.

When LED maker Cree introduced an LED bulb it expects to come out later this year, I asked about toxins and disposal. Cree vice president of marketing Greg Merritt said that there were no hazardous materials used in its bulb and that it is expected to comply with the ROHS European hazardous material directive.

UC Irvine’s Ogunseitan is testing large LED bulbs but has not yet published the results. “However, I can say that precautionary principle supports not throwing this in the regular trash for landfills,” he said.

Last month, I asked the Department of Energy about hazardous materials and large LED bulbs designed for home use. A representative said that, in general, these LED bulbs do not contain toxic chemicals in any significant amount. She added that consumers will face disposal only a few times in their lives given the long projected life of LEDs, which could be over 20 years, but it’s best for consumers to recycle them.

“That said, like most consumer electronics, at the end of their useful life, LEDs contain materials that are both valuable and recyclable. Where available, LEDs should be recycled using municipal recycling programs,” she said.

Consumers may not all be aglow with the idea, but the government-mandated phaseout of incandescent light bulbs has reached all the way to the winter home of Thomas Edison.
Under a 2007 federal energy law, manufacturers must phase out incandescent bulbs in favor of more efficient bulbs such as compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs, LED bulbs or new styles of halogen lights.

The law phases out 100-watt incandescent bulbs in January 2012, followed by the 75-watt version in 2013 and the 60- and 45-watt bulbs in 2014.

At the Edison & Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, the incandescent garden lights have been replaced, even though Edison is credited with making the first practical incandescent light.

“Edison would have been all for this, because he was always looking for a better way to do something,” said Chris Pendleton, CEO of the estates.

While CFLs use at least 75 percent less energy, some consumers complain the lighting is dimmer, doesn’t look as warm and takes a while to reach full brightness. Some also worry about disposal requirements, because the bulbs contain a few milligrams of mercury.

“Every time I go to the store, I pick up a few (incandescent) light bulbs,” said Kay Horn, 62, of Fort Myers. “I probably have enough light bulbs for the next 15 years.”
Jack Lurie, owner of Tropical Hardware in Fort Myers, said he hears customers complain about the phasing out of incandescent bulbs and he said their sales have increased.

“There is plenty of stock now,” he said, “but that will change.”

The American Lighting Association’s Larry Lauck hasn’t seen statistical signs of stockpiling but has heard anecdotal reports.

Such reports are common whenever a new standard is introduced, says the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Noah Horowitz. He says consumers will be able to buy incandescent, but new ones will have more efficient halogen capsules.

“Unless you prefer paying higher electricity bills, there’s no reason to hoard old incandescent bulbs,” Horowitz says.

Richard Downing, 81, of Fort Myers has been using CFL bulbs in his home for almost 10 years. He has been a fan of fluorescent bulbs for 30 years, since he installed them on a 40-foot ketch.

“They drew the battery down a heck of lot less,” he said.

He said he is concerned about the bulbs’ mercury content, mainly because he worries consumers will just toss them in their garbage.

“You aren’t supposed to do that, but you know people will,” Downing said.

Lee County’s recycling program won’t collect the CFL bulbs, but homeowners can drop them off at the Household Chemical Waste Collection facility, 6441 Topaz Court in Fort Myers.

While that sounds inconvenient, Downing said he can’t say whether it is.
“In 10 years of using those lights, I’ve never had to replace one,” he said. “They might cost just a little more, but you make up what you spend very quickly in the energy savings and longevity.”

The company on Wednesday at the Lightfair Intenrational conference will show off prototypes of a system that it says can lower the manufacturing costs of LED lighting for commercial buildings and flat-panel displays.

Last year, Rambus bought patents from Global Lighting Technologies related to components of a flat LED fixture. Having developed product prototypes and a manufacturing process, Rambus is now seeking to license that technology to other companies, executives said on Monday.

The components to a flat-plate LED designed for overhead lights. The textured gray layer is a lens to reflect light uniformly on a flat surface,
(Credit: Rambus)

The technology itself is not the actual LEDs, but components for an edge-lit lighting panel. LEDs are placed on the edge of a panel, which is about a half-inch thick. A “light guide,” made up of textured plastic, acts as series of tiny lenses to reflect the light so that it emits uniformly from the flat plate.

The prototypes that Rambus plans to show are two rectangle shaped light sources–one 2 feet by 2 feet and the other by 3 inches by 43 inches.

If the company is successful, larger versions of those flat-plate light sources would replace florescent bulbs used in office buildings. In a commercial product, manufacturers would license the process technology and use LEDs from another supplier, Rambus executives explained.

“My guess is that we’re about two years away from parity with fluorescents because LEDs are on a faster cost curve,” said Tim Messegee, vice president of marketing at Rambus.

Now companies or consumers buy LEDs based on the cost savings over time and for other benefits, such as the lack of mercury and the longer life of LEDs, he said.

The bulb will be dimmable and will provide 806 lumens, with the potential to save up to 80% in energy consumption, compared to incandescent bulbs.

Philips said the bulb has a 25,000-hour lifetime.

With federal legislation phasing out inefficient lighting in the years to come, it’s likely that additional LED replacement bulbs will hit the shelves in 2011. Last week GE (NYSE: GE) unveiled its first–a replacement for 40-watt bulbs.

Philips also detailed broader marketing plans for its LED offerings in years to come. The company is introducing a home lighting system called LivingAmbiance, which wirelessly integrates luminaires and lamps to create different light settings–including a range of thousands of different color–with touch-button control.

In 2010, the company will introdue a product platform of outdoor luminaires that it hopes municipalities will adopt for streetlighting.

The company is currently exhibiting its new products and concepts at the Light + Building architecture fair Frankfurt Germany.

So what is it about LED TVs that are better?

One of the strong criticisms of LCD TVs has always been the color and contrast. While LCD TVs control a competitive edge over plasma TVs in a lot of areas, the overall black levels of the traditional LCD TV cannot compete. To enhance the experience, manufactures began developing LED LCD TVs that offer a pair of lighting techniques that sharpen up color and contrast levels.

The first, standard edge-lit LED TVs, offer a slightly better lighting technique than a traditional LCD TV in that more powerful, more efficient lights located on the edge of the TV shine inward and diffuse evenly on the screen.

The second, full-matrix LEDs, utilize a technology better known as local dimming that disperse LED light from the back of the TV, instead of the sides, giving it a very even distribution of light. Essentially, the full-matrix technology is able to achieve unmatched color levels and contrast.

The beauty of the LED technology is not just the improved picture quality; LED TVs are more efficient and slimmer than just about any TV on the market. In fact, Samsung’s LED TVs use as much as 40% less power than any equivalent-sized traditionally-lit LCD TV.

Essentially, the best TVs on the market are LED TVs. So, where are the best places to buy the highest-rated LED TVs at the lowest prices?

Highly regarded as one of the best TVs in the last year, the Samsung UN55B8000 55-Inch 1080p 240 Hz LED HDTV has dropped significantly in price as Samsung has already launched many of the enhanced, upgraded C5000, C6000, C7000, and C8000 series models (the C7000 and C8000 are the new 3D LED TVs). Priced as low as $1,823.99, this local dimming model is almost $2,000 less than the suggested retail price, and has moved up to the #1 bestselling LED TV on Amazon.

If 3D LED is the direction you want to go, the Samsung UN55C7000 55-Inch 1080p 240 Hz 3D LED HDTV (Black) has dropped from $3,299.99 to $2,669.00 (more than $600 off a 2010 TV). As mentioned in other Tainted Green reviews, the Samsung 3D LED TVs includes a 2D to 3D converter that instantly changes regular TV into 3D TV. Few large retailers can even get close to this price.

Finally, if value is what you want and you don’t mind a non-Samsung LED TV, Sharp offers the Sharp AQUOS LC40LE700UN 40-Inch 1080p 120 Hz LED HDTV for under $900. The price is right and so far, the reviews have been very positive.

The time is now, when models are changing and prices are dropping, to buy an energy efficient, slimmed down LED TV.