By Joe Salimando www.eleblog.com
In mid-May, I went to Philadelphia for Lightfair. The session I had circled on my schedule was a seminar led by Dr. John W. (Jack) Curran of LED Transformations. I knew that this event was going to be an upgrade of the 2010 Lightfair in Las Vegas – which lots of people referred to, without quotes, as LEDfair.
But I had heard Curran in 2009 (see report here). I wanted to see if, two years later, he was as cautious in his views of the current state of LEDs.
Three quick notes:
1 – Curran may have spoken at Lightfair 2010 in Las Vegas, but I wasn’t in attendance.
2 – I had told someone else about Curran, and that person went to an early Lightfair 2011 education event (it was several hours long, longer than the session I attended) that also featured Curran. After listening to him, this person asked me when we met in Philadelphia: “If what he’s saying is true, why isn’t the industry waiting on these things?”
I have no answer.
3 – I have lots of notes, written quickly on what Curran said in Philly. But what sticks in my mind – and what I could not write down fast enough and in detail, as he presented it – was Curran’s relatively simple run-down of his house and where in it he could use LEDs.
Purpose of this blow-by-blow, room-by-room account was to show the audience where LEDs could be used, and would save energy – and where they could not. I can’t take you through it here because, although he’s not a “fast talker,” Curran went through this quickly.
For each application, he detailed where an LED would work and where it wouldn’t. We’re talking about an expert with a real-world approach here – his house.
At bottom, I believe he came up with LEDs as possible replacements for less than 736W of the 3048W of lights installed in his house. Is that good? Bad? Great? OK-but-not-great? This is a glass-is-half-full/half-empty argument, isn’t it?
You’ll have the answer for you. Mine is: It’s less than I would have been “led” to expect by the tremendous enthusiasm for these things.
What’s The Point?
LEDs are high-profile these days, and not just at LEDfair or in the electrical industry. Check out this transcript of what President Obama said in a visit (accompanied by his jobs council, which is headed by GE’s Jeff Immelt) to a U.S. factory owned by LED maker Cree. Here’s a piece of the President’s talk:
Now, breakthroughs like these have the potential to create new jobs in other sectors of the economy as well. Think about it. Cree makes energy-efficient lighting that can save businesses and consumers a lot of money. And there are a lot of buildings out there that need upgrading.
When the President of the U.S. says such things, it certainly helps to elevate the “LEDs are doggone great!” message, doesn’t it? You can’t “pay for this kind of advertising,” can you . . . except maybe in an election year?
For the investing public (which is still out there), there’s this release quoting a guy who claims LED lighting prices will drop by 90%. No, not “someday” – but by 2016.
This is pretty brave. Everyone knows that, when making a prediction, you can say WHAT is going to happen OR you can specify WHEN – but you do not do both.
Let’s say the guy is right. His prediction would indicate that LED prices will be falling all through the next five years. That’s going to make it awfully hard for any electrical contractor to “shun” the use of LEDs.
Put the already high profile of LEDs together with the coming legal ban on sales of (most existing) incandescent light bulbs, the crumminess of most CFLs on the market, and the likelihood of falling prices – and what ECs are likely to hear a lot of from customers in the next few years is: “You gotta put in LEDs for me.”
You can’t AVOID this; you probably can’t be the EC that never installs LEDs. Yet there are a couple of facts on which you might focus:
1. As Curran in his Lightfair speech reiterated – and as all of his listeners should have already known – LEDs are commonly promoted as “forever bulbs.” The word is: These things use less energy AND last 40,000 hours, 50,000 hours, 100,000 hours. Put this thing in, and it will be in the ceiling forever – you (the commercial building owner) won’t have to do a lot of replacement.
However, most LEDs are sold with a 6-month warranty. There are 4,400 hours in six months, you know. This seems to come up short of the claims, doesn’t it?
2. I’m not certain about this, but when a given electrical (lighting or otherwise) installation fails, it could be the EC that gets the first (angry) phone call. LEDs are likely to fail for a variety of reasons, ranging from how they were made – there is an issue called “binning” into which you might look – to the power quality in the building in which they were installed.
Hey, these things have semiconductors in them!
What You Can Do
What I’ve heard is that electrical people are giving their customers verbal warnings about LEDs – the reality vs. what the customer thinks he knows. And in the real world, the customer is waving off those concerns . . . it’s just the stodgy old EC resisting the new technology.
That’s fine. Well, really, it’s NOT fine – but I would like to place bets on how many of those conversations and wave-offs are going to be remembered when you get that angry call-back!
It seems obvious to conclude with this: To protect yourself, you might want to figure out how to get your warning, and the customer’s wave-off – on a piece of paper, maybe. Perhaps you and a lawyer can turn your verbal warning into a paragraph or two, and have the customer crystallize his arm-waving into a signature on a waiver.
Perhaps you’ll never need such a thing. Maybe each of your customers are reasonable people who remember what you said and how they made a mistake in not listening to you the first time.
That kind of runs against human nature, unfortunately.
NOTE: To read a Q-and-A on residential use of LED lamps with Curran, see page 26 of the April issue of Residential Lighting magazine – presented online in “flipbook” fashion (you’ll have to page over to pages 26-27 to see it).