Posted on 06/25/2007 3:08:11 AM PDT by Wiz
LEDs Expand Their Reach Into the Aesthetic-Minded Market for Home Lighting
EVERETT, Mass. (AP) -- Joey Nicotera's fascination with multicolored light bulbs bordered on obsession when he was a teenager. He framed posters in lights and decorated his own Christmas tree. When he couldn't find a color bulb he wanted, he got paint cans from the basement and made some himself, bathing his second-story bedroom in an eerie glow.
"I'd be driving home from work at night, and I could see his room from five blocks away, with all the weird colors and flashing lights," recalls his father, Joe Nicotera Sr.
Joey is now 32 and out of the family home. But a rainbow of ever-changing colors still emanates from his current living space, an 840-square-foot loft condominium in a renovated candy bar factory in Everett, just north of Boston.
Instead of painting light bulbs, Nicotera spent $5,000 to equip his bachelor pad with 54 fixtures containing light-emitting diodes, or LEDs -- devices similar to computer semiconductors that convert electricity into light and stream it out of glass domes the size of matchstick heads.
They may be pricey now, but LEDs are being touted as eventual replacements for standard, incandescent bulbs and even compact fluorescents because of their growing efficiency and predictions of increasingly lower costs.
And as LEDs expand their reach into the aesthetic-minded market for home lighting, they boast something traditional lighting sources can't: LEDs can be programmed to emit light in virtually any color without the use of filters, enabling homeowners to design their own living room light shows, or tailor the color of the light to their mood.
"If colored light is needed, now there is a technology that can cater to that," said Nadarajah Narendran, director of lighting research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
Nicotera counts himself among an apparent handful of lighting enthusiasts around the country who have outfitted their homes with large numbers of LEDs. Now, his pad is a popular party spot and a great place to bring dates.
"I wanted a Vegas cocktail lounge look, with a Jetsons flavor to it," said Nicotera, an information technology manager in Boston. "I always figured that George and Jane would have walls that changed color," he said of the old TV cartoon characters.
Narendran says niche applications are already emerging as homeowners install LEDs to light display cabinets and add color to high-end home theaters. But it's hard to say how many homeowners will follow Nicotera's example by installing color LEDs and programming light shows.
"It's a matter of personal preference, like fashions," Narendran said.
Nicotera installed all his LED fixtures himself. Each contains 45 to 75 of the tiny spotlight-producing LEDs, commonly used in on-off indicators for electronics and appliances. He doesn't have any incandescent bulbs and relies on 50 halogen fixtures for overhead light.
He says his 54 LED fixtures together use less electricity than a single 100-watt incandescent and account for just $2 a month on his utility bill.
But it's the light show capabilities that capture Nicotera's interest. He taps controls on a wall switch panel to choose among eight programs or uses lighting control software on his laptop to expand programming options even further. Each program varies the color and brightness of the LED arrays in hanging lamps and the LED strips in backlit wall shelving and kitchen cabinets.
The wall switch and laptop are linked to a flash memory device and a pair of VCR-sized transformers that control the lights from a hallway closet. Shelves and cabinets abruptly shift from one hue to the next or shimmer gradually through the spectrum, bathing the condo's neutral gray walls in light.
Nicotera runs a red-white-and-blue program each Fourth of July, and he can change colors on shelf panels to simulate Tetris, the falling-blocks video puzzle game. When Italy won soccer's World Cup last year, Nicotera displayed Italy's national colors in his first-floor condo, which is visible to nearby traffic.
"It was all red, white and green," Nicotera said. "People who would drive by would honk their horns."
Because of their color advantage, LEDs are being used to light display shelves at jewelry stores and supply ambiance in restaurants. Hotels are installing LEDs to provide splashes of exterior color. And Toronto's CN Tower is being lit this month with more than 1,300 color-changing LEDs running up the 1,815-foot structure.
As for LEDs that cast white light, Narendran expects it will be five to 10 years before such products begin seriously challenging other light sources in homes.
So far, cost is the biggest obstacle, but that should change over the next few decades.
Three years ago, the first 10 fixtures Nicotera mounted in the bathroom ceiling cost $125 apiece. Since then, the cost has come down to less than $75 each. He says he hasn't had to replace or fix any of his LEDs, which are touted to run continuously for 11 years.
Last Tuesday, Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics NV expanded its LED presence by offering $688 million to acquire Color Kinetics Inc., a decade-old Boston company that designed the CN Tower's new lighting and holds patents on systems to control LED color and brightness.
Fritz Morgan, Color Kinetics' chief technology officer, said the semiconductor technology underlying LEDs is becoming more affordable and efficient at a rate on par with advances in computing speed. Today's LEDs are about as efficient as the latest compact fluorescents, Morgan said, and they are improving faster than fluorescents.
"There's been a dramatic increase in just two or three years, where LEDs went from being as efficient as incandescents, to then being as good as halogens, to now being at the level of compact fluorescents," Morgan said.
Nicotera -- whose home is equipped with Color Kinetics LED products bought through distributors -- is so impressed with the technology that he's put his condo up for sale and plans to build a new home from scratch, equipped exclusively with LEDs.
His condo is being offered at $359,000 -- he may throw in the unit's LED lights and controls for a little extra, subject to negotiation.
Although the LEDs may turn off some prospective buyers, Nicotera's mother is proof that there can be rewards to investing in a new technology. She was initially skeptical when her son started planning his condo's design.
"When he started talking about having a wall of lights, I couldn't really imagine what he was talking about," Linda Nicotera said. "I thought it was going to look like a disco, or something on the tacky side.
"But there was a 'wow' factor when I finally saw it. It ended a lot better than I thought."
“I wanted a Vegas cocktail lounge look, with a Jetsons flavor to it,”
I’m suspicious of a 32 year old single male living in a loft.
Wonder why.
Bump and Bookmark
Interesting thread. I became a LED enthusiast after buying a Zipka LED headlamp for backcountry skiing. Headlamps typically lasted about 10 hours before the batteries failed. I showed up with my Zipka and ended up leading my friends to the cabin after all of their headlamps had failed.
It beats certain alternatives ... such as living with his parents.
excellent post! I am bookmarking it to read at work
I always carry my Surefire LED flashlight on my person, everywhere all the time, it uses one 3 volt battery on average every two or three months and I use this flashlight for inspection work on a daily basis. I had coworkers many years ago using Minimags, the bulbs would oxidized after about 20 hours and of course they sucked AA batteries real quick and here in Alaska at minus zero temps the batteries also failed unlike the Lithium 123 my Surefire uses.
Even though I have not been an active member in some time years ago I was regarded as a pioneer in LED flashlights of a sort and I hung out at this place:http://www.candlepowerforums.com/
There is a ton of useful information plus a lot of people there make LED lights like custom HID flashlights, high powered LED flashlights and unique items not known on the consumer market.
Fascinating. I wonder what the downside issues are, if any.
Everlasting light
Jun 19th 2007
From Economist.com
An environmentally friendly bulb that may never need changing
DESPITE its use to symbolise a bright idea, the traditional incandescent lightbulb is a dud. It wastes electricity, radiating 95% of the energy it consumes as heat rather than light. Its life is also relatively short, culminating in a dull pop as its filament fractures. Now a team of researchers has devised a lightbulb that is not only much more energy efficient. It also lasts, in effect, forever—that is, it is expected to last longer than the devices into which it is inserted. Moreover the lamp could be used for rear-projection televisions as well as general illumination.
The trick to a longer life, for lightbulbs at least, is to ensure that the lamp has no electrodes. Although electrodes are undeniably convenient for plugging bulbs directly into the lighting system, they are also the main reason why lamps fail. The electrodes wear out. They can react chemically with the gas inside the lightbulb, making it grow dimmer. They are also difficult to seal into the structure of the bulb, making the rupture of these seals another potential source of failure.
Scientists working for Ceravision, a company based in Milton Keynes, in Britain, have designed a lamp that eliminates the need for electrodes. Their device uses microwaves to transform electricity into light. It consists of a relatively small lump of aluminium oxide into which a hole has been bored. When the aluminium oxide is bombarded with microwaves generated from the same sort of device that powers a microwave oven, it generates a concentrated electric field in the void.
If a cylindrical capsule containing a suitable gas is inserted into the hole, the atoms of the gas become ionised. As electrons accelerate in the electric field, they gain energy that they pass on to the atoms and molecules of the gas as they collide with them, creating a glowing plasma. The light is bright, and the process is energy efficient. Indeed, while traditional lightbulbs emit just 5% of their power as light, and fluorescent tubes about 15%, the Ceravision lamp has an efficiency greater than 50%.
Because the lamp has no filament, the scientists who developed it think it will last for thousands of hours of use—in other words, decades. Moreover the light it generates comes from what is almost a single point, which means that the bulbs can be used in projectors and televisions. Because of this, the light is much more directional and the lamp could thus prove more efficient than bulbs that scatter light in all directions. Its long life would make the new light ideal for places where the architecture makes changing lightbulbs a complicated and expensive job. Its small size makes it comparable to light-emitting diodes but the new lamp generates much brighter light than do those semiconductor devices.
Another environmental advantage of the system is that it does not have to use mercury. The metal is highly toxic and is found in most of the bulbs used today, including the energy-saving bulb, fluorescent tubes and the high-pressure bulbs used in projectors. Its developers reckon it should be cheap to make.
With lighting accounting for some 20% of electricity use worldwide, switching to a more efficient system could save not only energy but also on emissions of carbon. Now that would be a bright idea.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9356447&CFID=6374450&CFTOKEN=53124613
cree.com implies the leds are more efficient and are getting to higher output for less energy.
Do you have a 22-27 year old daughter? :-)
I don’t like the LEDs I have seen so far. Something about the quality of the light is harsh on the reading.
Say what you want but he's no metrosexual.
There are also experiments using LED for wireless data transmission, including traffic light LEDs. It’s range is not long , but can transmit broadband quality data (currently 10MBPS). Implemented into traffic systems, it could tell how long the light will be green, yellow, red, assist blind people, and even provide traffic information ahead. LEDs are pretty cool for its fast blinking rate. However, I also learned not long ago about a more effecient source for room light, which is solid state laser. It is assumed that it has an infinite life span, and there is no need to replace it once installed. However, laser has different characteristics from beam, which sprays, and there is a need to scatter the solid state laser (white color) to spray the light into multiple directions. It must also be eye safe. LEDs too, also are dangerous to look at for a long time (well, not many people woud do so).
No, I have a 38 year old son, Dr blam.
I like that way of bumping for later, I might steal it.
B4L8r
Keep in mind that it's OpenSource, and released under the GPL. :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.