The City of Asheville has initiated North Carolina’s first large-scale deployment of LED street lights. This large-scale deployment, made possible through a grant from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, allows Asheville to take the necessary steps to improve energy efficiency and reduce its overall carbon footprint.

In the initial phase of the project, completed in June 2011, 730 street lights were replaced with 67-watt to 195-watt LEDway® luminaires. An additional 2,913 LEDway® street lights are currently being installed, and the City anticipates saving 50 percent of current energy use and maintenance costs due to the LED upgrade.

“Upgrading to LED street lights allows us to decrease energy consumption, increase energy efficiency and contribute to the sustainability of our community,” said Maggie Ullman, energy coordinator for the Asheville Office of Sustainability. “This exciting initiative helps affirm Asheville’s role as a leader in carbon footprint reduction.”

Here are just some of the benefits of the Asheville installation project:

• By upgrading all HPS and mercury vapor street lights to LEDway® luminaires, the City anticipates a savings of approximately $260,000 per year from the combined energy and maintenance savings.
• Phase one of the LEDway® luminaires installation reduces the City’s carbon footprint by an estimated one percent and saves approximately $45,000 in energy cost per year.

In addition to saving energy, this installation demonstrates how municipalities and local utilities can work together. “As more municipalities commit to replacing outdated, inefficient lighting with the support of their local utilities, LED adoption and consumer awareness continue to increase,” said Christopher Ruud, President of Ruud Lighting, a Cree Company. “We applaud the City of Asheville and Progress Energy for working together for the benefit of its citizens demonstrating the growing trend of cities and municipalities working together to join the LED lighting revolution.”

Is your city taking the necessary steps to install LED lighting? Tell us about it.

“Initially I was all about CFLs,” Colleen wrote me, “but the more research I did, the less enchanted I have become. LEDs seem to be the way to go. I did incorporate some into my new kitchen and find I now prefer them over my incandescent lamps.”

Once Colleen got a taste of LED lighting, she wanted more. So she entered (and won) our November LED lighting giveaway by submitting a picture of her large family room, which is lit almost entirely with lamps. Colleen won five Cree CR6 LED downlights, which she says she plans to use to accent her fire place and provide overhead task lighting without an assortment of lamps. Here’s the photo she submitted:

“We purchased the house in the mid-90s and the lighting in this room has been a thorn in my side ever since. The expense of the lighting always put it on the back burner so I am quite thrilled to be able to move forward with this project. I really think it will finish off the room,” Colleen wrote.

Not only will Colleen’s new Cree LED downlights deliver beautiful light quality (warm, 2700K color temperature), the lights will also save her energy. The CR6 LED downlight (pictured below) consumes only 10.5 watts, but delivers the same warm light you’d expect from a 65-watt halogen light.

And once Colleen installs her new recessed LED lighting, she won’t have to worry about changing them for years – possibly decades – to come. That’s because the CR6 LED downlight is designed to last 50,000 hours, which means Colleen could leave them lit eight hours a day, seven days a week and they could last more than 17 years. And, let’s be real, chances are Colleen’s family isn’t going to be using the lights that frequently, which means they’ll likely last even longer.

If you want to see how Cree LED lighting can solve your lighting challenges, submit a photo of the lighting you want to replace to our January contest. One lucky winner will receive five Cree CR6 LED downlights to transform their light-style.

Building and facility executives participated in a national survey and chose the winners from 557 possible products, making this award a veritable popularity contest. Readers were asked to select their choices for Top Products awards that met the criteria of innovation and usefulness to facility managers. Based on reader votes, 73 products were selected as Top Products winners and the SLM IP66 area luminaire featuring BetaLED® technology was one of the winners. The SLM IP66 area luminaire will be featured in this month’s issue of Building Operating Management (BOM) as a Top Products Award Winner.

Cree’s SLM IP66 area luminaire featuring BetaLED® technology has a distinctive, slim, low-profile design and offers architectural character for exterior applications. The combination of a unique modular design with light bar scalability and patented NanoOptic® technology contributes to exceptional lighting performance and reduced energy use.

This low-maintenance area luminaire significantly reduces energy consumption compared to traditional lighting technology and provides optimum target illumination performance—that means the light goes where you want it, and not where you don’t. The unique design of the SLM IP66 lends to maintaining lower operating temperatures that can contribute to the longevity of the luminaire and the light bar-based design means the light levels of the luminaire can be scaled for the specific application. The SLM IP66 luminaire is designed with the total systems approach, integrating best-in-class LED packages, driver technology, optics and style. Extended operating life and exceptional lumen maintenance are achieved in a range of environmental conditions.

We’re proud that the readers of BOM selected the SLM IP66 as a Top Product. Want more information? Check out http://www.betaled.com/us-en/TechnicalLibrary/TechnicalDocuments/BetaLED-SLM-IP66.aspx.

Unlike LED luminaires that can provide more than a decade of near maintenance-free sustained illumination, HID systems require much more maintenance over such time frames. The main reason for the differing maintenance needs between the two technologies is differences in the rate of lumen depreciation or the rate at which a light source loses light output over time. While LED luminaires can be designed to have a very low rate of lumen depreciation that eliminates the need to re-lamp over their intended application lives, HID solutions are unable to avoid re-lamping cycles and the associated costs that come along with such required maintenance.

A lighting design process is an effective tool that incorporates product specific lumen maintenance predictions for a given source technology to help predict some level of sustained illumination performance into the future. Lighting designs also assume that the lighting system selected will be properly maintained to avoid illumination levels that fall below their original design intent. For even the best HID sources, it typically means re-lamping every two years for a normal dusk-to-dawn system that operates daily. Should you decide to delay re-lamping you have, in effect, decided to dip below the minimum illumination levels that you had originally set out to deliver. It also means an increase in random lamp outages as lamps begin to burnout at a much faster rate and low light levels increasingly become no light levels.

Unfortunately as budgets become tighter it seems easier to delay or simply eliminate group re-lamping altogether as a means to save money. This, unfortunately, comes at the expense of safety and quality of life concerns.

LED luminaires offer a better solution. In addition to the potential for significant energy savings, there is also the opportunity to significantly reduce maintenance-related expense. These combined savings can help avoid some of the tough budget decisions we face today.

So although we may not always have a choice in terms of avoiding “high maintenance” people, we definitely can avoid the “high maintenance” lighting systems of the past by incorporating LED solutions today.

How are you being proactive and avoiding possible maintenance issues? Share your story.

But what should you verify? To better limit risk it’s important to understand where risk resides. Some typical questions could include:

• How do I know I’ll get the necessary sustained light levels over the duration of my application?
• How do I know that the luminaire mounting is strong enough to withstand vibration over time?
• How do I know the luminaire and its paint finish are durable enough to resist corrosion?

It’s important to understand the difference between specifying product features versus specifying product performance. Specific product features may imply performance, but by themselves fall short of ensuring any specific level of performance. For example, a street light luminaire that advertises a product feature utilizing four mounting bolts, instead of two, may imply a certain level of increased performance. For instance, it may imply resistance to conditions such as vibration. But without credible performance data that specifically addresses vibration resistance, no assumption regarding a product’s resistance to vibration should be made. Specifying product performance removes product features from the specification and puts the focus on what actually reduces risk, some level of product performance.

Lets get back to the questions. Would the level of risk be more greatly reduced by pointing to either product specific features or credible performance data? Well if the movie Jerry Maguire was about a great lighting designer, he would have probably shouted, “Show Me the Data!” There are relevant standards in place that can be referenced to quantify levels of durability for the three questions above and more. Once the necessary performance level is determined and specified, potential suppliers should verify their ability to provide certain levels of performance with credible data so as to reduce risk.

But, what about product warranties – they minimize risk, right? Although warranties are designed to reduce risk, warranties also present certain risks as well. The first risk is based on the strength and credibility of the company offering the warranty in the first place. Two nearly identical five-year warranties may seem equal at first glance, but if there is a high degree of uncertainty that one of the two companies may even survive for five years, it’s unlikely these two warranties would be viewed as equals. Overall product reliability is another factor to consider when determining the potential strength or value of a warranty. Companies with proven performance are probably less likely to experience catastrophic failures on a scale that may jeopardize their ability to honor warranty claims compared to new companies entering the market.

So the goal to managing risk shouldn’t be left solely to a good warranty. Even the best warranties do not eliminate risk, since associated costs may be incurred should warranty claims need to be made. Therefore, specifying performance during the product selection process is the best way to minimize risk. Remember, “Trust, but verify.”

It could be a major shopping center. Yes, it would be great to have your favorite retailers close to home rather than having to drive 15 miles to get to them. But you don’t want it within walking distance, because then you’d have to deal with the noise, the traffic and everything else that goes with it.

The same goes for landfills and power plants. You’re glad your favorite appliances have power and that your garbage has somewhere to go, but you don’t want the facility that generates the power or your garbage’s new home to be visible from your back door. Yet at some point, if we don’t change our ways, that’s exactly what could happen.

One way you can protect your personal back yard is by specifying LED lighting instead of High Intensity Discharge (HID) fixtures in any lighting projects. And the beauty is, making that move not only reduces waste and potential environmental hazards – it helps you save money. Here’s how.

Typical well maintained parking structures that operate 24 hours per day, 7 days a week with metal halide technology will be scheduled for group re-lamping approximately every 9 months. Which means a parking structure with 1,000 lamps will potentially add 1,000 lamps (bonus: which contain mercury!) to the waste stream every 9 months. Those lamps take up real estate, and as Will Rogers said, they’re not making any more of that.

So sooner or later, the disposal company has to build a new landfill – maybe next to you. If that’s not bad enough, as much as we’d like to believe that all lamps containing mercury ranging from the 1,000 HID lamps in our example above to the CFL lamps the neighbor down the street is using in their home will end up being properly recycled, sadly we know that this won’t always be the case. So as disturbing a sight that new landfill might be, what could be even more disturbing is the potential mercury that is being released from the improperly disposed lamps you can’t see.

Contrast this with an LED solution. LEDs contain no mercury. In addition, LED solutions can be designed to provide near maintenance-free service for more than a decade, even in our 24/7 parking structure example. Over a ten year period the owners of that 1,000 HID lamp parking structure will need to determine how to safely dispose of more than 12,000 lamps that a properly designed LED solution could avoid altogether. But there’s more to it than that. The materials used in BetaLED® luminaires are also RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) compliant, which means dangerous substances commonly used in electrical and electronics appliances are also avoided. In addition, BetaLED products are highly recyclable making it much less likely that they’ll see the landfill. Instead, they end up in other products – perhaps even in new LED luminaires. Ah, the circle of life.

Finally, we know LEDs can save significant energy consumption. But when coupled with adaptive control systems that can range from a simple occupancy sensor to a complex network based system, LED luminaires can save even more energy consumption. Let’s look at our parking garage again. There are probably large blocks of times when certain areas are vacant. Keeping the lights operating at a level that always assumes occupancy is just wasting energy and money. But with LED products that utilize adaptive controls you can significantly reduce energy consumption even further during periods of inactivity and instantly increase light levels as spaces become occupied. Not only does that reduce energy cost – it also can extend the longevity of an LED system as well.

The best way to make NIMBY work is to avoid the need in the first place. How could you use LED luminaires to keep your back yard landfill- and power plant-free?

Ingrid is the October winner of Cree’s LED lighting photo contest. She sent in this photo of these dim downlights in the bathroom of a restaurant in the Madison, Wisconsin area:

Here's the photo Ingrid submitted.

“We were absolutely appalled at this attempt at energy efficiency when we saw it,” Ingrid wrote in an email to me.

So were our judges. While we always applaud attempts to make lighting more efficient, we also believe that folks shouldn’t have to compromise on light quality to save energy. Ingrid won five Cree CR6 LED downlights for exposing this poorly lit bathroom.

“My goal is to deliver these five cans directly to the owner of the restaurant in hopes that they’ll fix it.  I entered the contest since they were so obviously in need of assistance.  Color quality and hospitality feel are so important in a restaurant restroom,” Ingrid wrote.

We hope the restaurant owner sees the light and takes just a few minutes to install our downlights in their bathroom. Then they’ll know it’s possible to save energy without making restaurant patrons look sickly under the lights.

Cree's CR6 LED downlight consumes only 10.5 watts.

Our CR6 LED downlights feature Cree TrueWhite™ Technology, which is our patented approach to delivering bright, incandescent-like light that is more energy efficient than fluorescents. So the ladies who step under our lights in the bathroom will actually get to see what they look like, instead of having their reflections cloaked in dim, ugly light.

Other cool features of Cree’s CR6 LED downlight include:

• Low Energy Consumption: This LED light consumes only 10.5 watts, but delivers the same light quality you would expect from a 65 watt Halogen light.
• Long Lifetime: Designed to last 50,000 hours, the CR6 downlight could last more than 17 years if you left it on eight hours a day, seven days a week. For a restaurant or other business that may have to pay someone to change light bulbs, this could lead to great maintenance savings.
• They Can  Dim Beautifully: Dimming your lights is one of the easiest ways to change the mood and rack up energy savings. The CR6 LED downlight is dimmable to 5 percent, giving you a chance to customize your lighting while saving more energy since the lights consume even less energy the more they’re dimmed.

Don’t miss your chance to win Cree CR6 LED downlights in our November contest. Just submit a photo of the lights at your home or business, showing us why you think you should get new Cree LED lights. Each month, our judges award one lucky winner 5 Cree CR6 LED lights. Submit your photo here.

When regular unleaded gasoline was around $2 to $2.25 per gallon, hybrid cars were favored mostly by environmentally-conscious people and drivers who just wanted to be different. But when gas prices broke the $3 per gallon ceiling, and especially when they hovered around $4, suddenly you started seeing them everywhere. “Sure, they cost a little more up-front,” car buyers reasoned, “but we’ll easily make up for that when we’re smiling as we pass the gas pumps while others are miserably paying through the nose for a tank every few days.”

That’s the thing about the cost of a major investment. It isn’t only about what you pay to receive the goods. It’s about what it costs you overall, for as long as you use whatever it is.

This reasoning certainly applies to exterior and interior lighting. It’s not just about what the fixture costs initially. As this blog post says, it’s the total cost of ownership – including the cost of maintenance, as well as the cost of energy consumed by such solutions.

Take street lights, for example. A “20,000 hour” High Intensity Discharge (HID) lamp in a typical exterior scenario will likely be scheduled for replacement at 8,000 hours of service. Which, if you assume an average of 12 hours “on” per day, works out to 1.8 years.

Now compare that to an LED system that costs a little more to purchase up-front. For instance, an LED system rated at 50,000 hours will actually last 50,000 hours. What a concept! Again, assuming it’s on for 12 hours per day, that puts its service life at 11.4 years.

But the cost of the system isn’t the only thing involved. Replacing lamps also means sending out a road crew, paying for the fuel for the truck, shutting down lanes (thus suffering the ire of citizens who want the lamp replaced, but don’t want to be held up in traffic while it happens), properly disposing of the old lamp, etc. And you pay all those things every time a lamp needs to be replaced.

Now here’s the kicker: LED systems continue to get more efficient each year, which means over the long term the cost to implement will likely keep going down. So by the time you’re ready to replace that system, in 11 years, it may actually cost you less.

Perhaps by then we’ll all be driving battery-powered vehicles. What do you think?

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!

Back then; the lighting industry was dominated by high intensity discharge sources like metal halide and high pressure sodium. Those lights were based on systems that often required the so-called 20,000-hour lamps in a standard exterior scenario to be replaced in masses as early as 8,000 hours after they were installed. Which means scheduled bulb replacements would have started just two years after installation.

Think about what that really means. While businesses and government agencies have always been told that they should do group “re-lamping” at the 8,000-hour mark, the fiscal reality is that hardly any of them ever do. They usually do spot re-lamping instead. That gets pretty costly year in and year out when you tally up the maintenance costs of hiring a crew, getting a lift truck out to the facility, and buying and installing the replacement lamps. It also results in poor lighting when lights go out, creating safety and image issues as well.

LED-based exterior lighting systems, on the other hand, not only can be designed to last up to 100,000 hours – they actually can remain in service that long, almost maintenance-free. That means they can last up to 20 years. By the time you’d need to replace your LED luminaire, who knows where technology will have taken us? Maybe we’ll all finally be carrying around the portable quantum generators that were predicted.

For businesses and governments looking to make smart infrastructure investments, LED-based exterior systems offer greater reliability, a wider range of optics to choose from, and can now last near maintenance-free for more than a decade. It’s one of the smartest fiscal moves they can make. Much smarter than our old washers and dryers that have needed to be replaced in the past 20 years.