Of course, we all know about the energy and maintenance savings that come from LEDs. In Indian Wells, California, the city replaced over 100 six-inch incandescent downlights in the City Hall, Emergency Operations Center, and Public Works Maintenance Facility with Cree LR6 LED downlights. The old incandescent lamps burned 3,640 hours per year and consumed 30,385 kilowatt-hours per year. Now, the new LEDs burn the same amount of time, but consume only 3,969 kilowatt-hours per year, saving the city almost $4,500. Not only can other office buildings benefit from savings seen at these municipal  buildings in Indian Wells, but LED lighting can also improve the workplace for employees.

Many studies conducted have shown LED lighting can improve employee efficiency and morale. Fluorescent lighting can make workers feel sick and make them less productive during the workday, which hurts the employees and the company. High exposure to ultra violet rays from compact fluorescent lamps can increase feelings of depression and fatigue in employees. The lamps also generate heat and cause “hot spots” to occur on the lamps, which means the rest of the light dims, causing eye strain. CFLs also contain mercury, and exposure to mercury from broken lamps can cause permanent damages to the lungs, throat, and skin. LED lighting is a healthier alternative lighting option for office buildings. LEDs do not flicker, which decreases workplace strain and headaches. Studies have also shown LEDs can help reduce the risk of developing cancer in women who work in shifts or windowless environments.

We hope to see more office buildings choosing healthy, energy efficient LEDs to create a happier and more productive workplace.

We are pleased to find that two popular United States chain restaurants have recently decided to retrofit their restaurants with LEDs. LED lamps help improve the appearance of food and highlight decorations around the restaurant. They also save money by consuming less power than other fixtures and can lower the power consumed by the air conditioning because they don’t give off heat. LEDs can also illuminate outdoor signs.

Chili’s, an American Tex-Mex cuisine restaurant, is installing 125,000 LED lamps in the interior and exterior of all 827 of its corporate restaurants. Brinker International, parent company of Chili’s and Maggiano’s restaurants, purchased the new lighting manufactured with Cree XLamp LEDs from Eco-story LED Lighting Solutions. According to LEDs Magazine, “Eco-story claims this will be ‘the largest U.S. roll-out of LED lamp technology to date.’” They are replacing 30-50 watt lamps with 4.9-watt LED MR16s and 60-watt PAR20 and PAR30 lamps with 6-watt LEDs. Other indoor and outdoor lamps were also replaced. Brinker’s savings from this installation are almost unbelievable! It calculated each restaurant would save $87.00 per week, totaling to $3.7 million each year! Bill Stauffer, co-founder of Eco-story, said the appearance and lighting quality in Chili’s has greatly improved with the new LEDs.

Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill & Bar, who call themselves “the world’s largest casual dining restaurant,” hired LED Saving Solutions to install its first retrofit of its restaurants in Newtown, Pennsylvania. They chose lights that gave off similar light to what they had installed previously to keep the mood and dining experience the same. LED Savings Solutions’ Lighting Audit and Savings Report analyzed the new lighting and found that the restaurant will save $150,000 in energy costs and reduce CO2 emissions by 1.8 million pounds. If all 2,000 Applebee’s restaurants in the chain switched to LEDs, they would save a combined total of $1.5 million per month, $18 million per year, and $300 million over the lifetime of the lamps!

With these kinds of projected savings, we hope to see more restaurant LED retrofits!

Today, October 21^st, General Electric is celebrating World Lighting Appreciation Day. Today marks the 131^st anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison, founder of General Electric, testing the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb. It’s crazy to think about what life would be like without the light bulb. We would hope that someone would have eventually invented it, but if not, we’d be stuck lighting candles and torches to get around in the dark!

To celebrate, General Electric is hosting a Lighting Redefined Symposium at its headquarters in Niskayuna, New York, where the company will make an important announcement about an important breakthrough in LED lighting technology. They will also be taking photos of Edison around the campus. You can view photos of the great inventor on www.facebook.com/edisonsdesk.

General Electric is asking people around the world to also celebrate Lighting Appreciation Day by tweeting their thoughts on lighting, how it has impacted their life now and where they think lighting developments may go in the future. People can also include photos and videos of their favorite lighting displays in their homes, companies, around their city, or even holiday lighting displays. We know some of you go crazy with holiday lighting decorations on the interior and exterior of your homes! When tweeting, use the hashtag #weheartlighting so that others can see your response. If you don’t have a Twitter and want to see what everyone is saying about Lighting Appreciation Day, go to www.twitter.com and search #weheartlighting.

Check back with us soon to see what General Electric’s breakthrough LED technology announcement was all about! Happy World Lighting Appreciation Day, everyone!

A six-month installation of LED street lights began in early April in Scottsdale, Arizona. Scottsdale has been using red, yellow, and green LED traffic signals since 1997, but has decided to replace 25% of the city’s street lights in neighborhoods and major intersections with LED street lights. The city received funding for the project from The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which gives grants for energy-efficient projects.

The LED traffic signals Scottsdale has been using have already saved them a considerable amount of money in energy costs and maintenance. They realized they can save more by installing LED street lights! The LED street lights will last at least 15 years, and will not need to be maintained by crews during those years. The installation of the LED street lights will help the city save by reducing energy consumption by 42%. The new lighting will also eliminate 853 metric tons of greenhouse emissions. The LED street lights will provide a whiter, crisper, more uniform light for drivers and pedestrians. The lighting will also be focused downward, which will decrease light pollution. Previous fixtures gave off an orange-hue and a good portion of the light escaped upward. We need our lighting pointed where we need it!

We are pleased to hear about Scottsdale’s installation of LED lighting! We hope to see more cities make the switch!

OSRAM SYLVANIA, one of the leading lighting manufacturers, recently released the results of its fall 2010 Commercial Lighting Survey. The manufacturers conducted telephone interviews with 352 purchasing and facilities decision-makers and lighting designers and specifiers in the education, healthcare, hospitality, office, and retail sectors to find out the needs of these groups as far as commercial lighting and their thoughts on LEDs. Survey results revealed 81% of the interviewees are searching for energy-efficient lighting! We have more results for you below:

• 73% said they are using or planning to use LED lighting in their commercial space.
• 71% of facilities and lighting professionals have evaluated their commercial lighting this year.
• 53% have evaluated their lighting in the last six months.
• 84% said energy efficiency, operating costs, and maintenance are priorities when deciding on what lighting to use.
• 76% said it is more important to have lighting that will save them money over the lifetime of the lamp even if the initial costs are high.

The top reasons these commercial businesses are already using or are planning to use LEDs is because the lamps are energy efficient, long-lasting, less expensive in the long run, and need less maintenance compared to other lamps. Ninety of the 98 businesses already using LED lighting have had a positive or somewhat positive experience with the lamps. We hope the advertisement of commercial businesses using LED lighting will spark the interest of smaller businesses to make the switch. If they have had a positive experience with LED lighting, so can you!

It is exciting to see that more and more businesses and cities are replacing their old energy-wasting lighting fixtures with LED lamps. What is even more exciting is the support and funding that some projects are receiving from the government and other programs around the United States! In Menomonee Valley near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Potawatomi Bingo Casino is replacing 1,700 fixtures in its parking garage with BetaLED LED fixtures. The project is costing $918,000, but was made more affordable by a $500,000 grant from the United States Department of Energy and a financing package with Uihlein Electric and Godfrey & Kahn. The casino is hoping to save $120,000 annually on maintenance and $101,000 annually on energy, for a combined total of $221,000 savings. They are also looking into installing LED lighting inside of the casino and in slot machines.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Governor Edward Randall awarded an $816,105 grant to begin replacing all city lights with LEDs. During phase one of the retrofit, the city will replace 40,000 high pressure sodium fixtures with LEDs. They expect to save $110,000 on electricity and maintenance. The new lighting will save taxpayers over $2.5 million each year. Funding for this project is coming from the $6 million Duquesne Light Settlement from 2006 when the power rates increased, and from the governor, who gave $20.5 million in grants on September 1 to support clean energy projects indoors and outdoors. The city of Wilbur, Nebraska will be replacing 150 high pressure sodium fixtures with LEDs in November. They are receiving a $122,145 grant from the United States Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant and $30,536 in local matching funds for a combined total of $152,681. The city of Cary, North Carolina is replacing 34 high pressure sodium fixtures with LEDs in order to save $5,000 annually on energy. This project is being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

We are happy to see government and other program involvement and support in these LED retrofits. The more funding they can give to cities looking into retrofits, the more motivated the cities will be to look into LED lighting and begin the LED revolution. Not only will it save cities money in the end, but the installation of LEDs will reduce carbon emissions and make this a safer, more sustainable planet.

This is part two of our feature of a segment produced by “16:9 – The Bigger Picture,” in which experts confirm the dangers of compact fluorescent lamps. We covered Part One in a separate Blog Post. Part one features experts confirming that some CFL lamps are giving off unusual amounts of UV rays and interviews with people who have had headaches, rashes, and other symptoms from the lamps.

Part two of the segment is entitled “Dirty Energy.” The segment begins with a woman who is measuring dirty electricity of the lamps, saying the lamps should read less than 50 while most of the lamps on camera were reading in the hundreds. What is dirty electricity, you may ask. Dirty electricity comes from televisions, dimmer switches, stereo equipment, computers, fluorescent and halogen lighting, and other energy-efficient products. These devices use power supplies and transformers to covert the common 60 Hz AC to a lower voltage to save energy. Instead of having a steady energy current to these devices, the transformers send power to the devices in short bursts. This “stop-and-start” of power causes electrical feedback and contaminates homes and buildings, which exposes people to “dirty electricity.”

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is said to be caused from exposure to the magnetic fields caused by dirty electricity. Symptoms of exposure to the magnetic fields include headache, fatigue, insomnia, dizziness, emotional issues, nausea, rash, swelling, and more. A neurologist in the video said that although there is no scientific evidence the symptoms people are having are from the magnetic fields, he has had similar complaints from many patients about CFLs causing them to feel sick. If you think you have had any of the symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the experts in the segment advise you turn the lamps off for a few days and see if the problems go away.

The video closes saying that LEDs may be the best for the future! We hope the expert opinions and interviews with people having health issues with these lamps will convince CFL users to toss out their lamps and choose LEDs.

For more on dirty electricity, click here or here.

We recently came across a two-part segment about the dangers of compact fluorescent lamps and interviews with people who have supposedly fallen ill from the lamps. The segment was produced by “16:9 – The Bigger Picture,” a Canadian investigative news television series.

As we have stated in previous blogs, even though CFLs are cheaper and consume less energy than incandescent lamps, they are hazardous to have around the home and office. In the first segment of the episode, 16:9 did some investigative research and interviewed experts who have confirmed that CFLs give off ultra-violet rays, similar to sunlight. Scientists in London revealed that one in five CFLs randomly tested were found to be emitting unusual levels of UV rays. The 16:9 reporters also tried contacting three of the more popular lighting manufacturers (Osram Sylvania, Philips, and General Electric) to ask them about their product’s UV rays. They only received a response from Philips, saying UV concerns were under investigation.

The video also features an interview with a woman diagnosed with Lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes her to be sensitive to sunlight. She told reporters she broke out in a rash after sitting near a CFL for 20 minutes.

We hope you come back later during the week to catch our blog featuring part two of the segment about dirty electricity and electromagnetic hypersensitivity, which is said to be caused by CFLs.

In Lutron Electronics’ most recent edition of LEDitorial, Lutron’s featured product was its new Hi-lume A-Series LED Driver, which is the world’s first LED driver to feature smooth, constant dimming for any LED fixture. This is an important innovation in LED lighting because if an LED fixture is dimmable, it usually has to be matched up to a certain driver. According to the website, the Hi-lume dims continuously from 100% to 1% lighting levels and is rated for a 50,000 hour lifetime.

Lutron Electronics is a widely respected company among commercial lighting decision makers, and created the first solid state dimmers. Until the mid-20^th century, dimmers were made to control lighting on stages and in theaters, not for home use. In 1959, Joel Spira created the first solid state dimmer that could be installed in place of a light switch in the home. Spira, partnered with Ruth Spira, incorporated Lutron Electronics in 1961. Today, the company holds 2,700 patents worldwide and is the first company to mass-market dimmers and systems of linked dimmers successfully. It offers lighting controls for fluorescent, halogen incandescent, magnetic low-voltage, electronic low voltage, and most importantly, LED fixtures. The company has also led the way in using window shade technology to control daylight and electric light.

Using dimmers with lighting fixtures has many perks. According to Lutron’s website, dimmers have already cut down electricity use by 9.2 billion kWh and reduced electricity bills by $1 billion each year. Dimmers could make even more of an impact on the environment if they became more widely used. “Lutron estimates that by installing just two dimmers in place of two standard light switches in every home in the US, the potential annual savings could be $1.5 billion in electricity and close to 25 billion pounds of CO2 – the equivalent to taking more than 1 million cars off the road.” Dimmers also help increase the lifetime of the bulbs because they use much less energy when they are dimmed. Longer lifetime = less spent on new lamps! They are also useful for “setting the mood” for a dinner party or reducing light during the daytime.

We are excited to see Lutron Electronics raising the bar with its innovations in universal LED drivers in dimmers and hope to hear about their successes with the Hi-lume A-Series LED Driver in the future.