Do New Bulbs Save Energy if They Don’t Work?

SAN FRANCISCO — It sounds like such a simple thing to do: buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, save the planet.

But a lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

Take the case of Karen Zuercher and her husband, in San Francisco. Inspired by watching the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” they decided to swap out nearly every incandescent bulb in their home for energy-saving compact fluorescents. Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however, they wound up coping with a mess.

Irritation seems to be rising as more consumers try compact fluorescent bulbs, which now occupy 11 percent of the nation’s eligible sockets, with 330 million bulbs sold every year. Consumers are posting vociferous complaints on the Internet after trying the bulbs and finding them lacking.

Bulb makers and promoters say the overall quality of today’s compact fluorescents is high. But they also concede that it is difficult to prevent some problem bulbs from slipping through.

Experts say the quality problems are compounded by poor package instructions. Using the bulbs incorrectly, such as by screwing low-end bulbs into fixtures where heat is prone to build up, can greatly shorten their lives.

Some experts who study the issue blame the government for the quality problems, saying an intensive federal push to lower the price essentially backfired by encouraging manufacturers to use cheap components.

“In the pursuit of the holy grail, we stepped on the consumer,” said Michael Siminovitch, director of a lighting center at the University of California, Davis.

Compact fluorescents once cost as much as $30 apiece. Now they go for as little as $1 — still more than regular bulbs, but each compact fluorescent is supposed to last 10 times longer, save as much as $5.40 a bulb each year in electricity, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal in power plants.

Much of the credit for that sharp cost decline goes to the Energy Department. The agency asked manufacturers in 1998 to create cheaper models and then helped find large-volume buyers, like universities and utilities, to buy them. That jump-started a mass market and eventually led to sales of discounted bulbs at retailers like Costco, Wal-Mart Stores and Home Depot.

Consumers are supposed to be able to protect themselves by buying bulbs certified under the government’s Energy Star program. But experts and some environmental groups complain that Energy Star standards are weak, permitting low-quality bulbs with too high a level of mercury, a toxic metal contained in all compact fluorescents.

The government, which will begin enforcing tighter specifications this year, says it must seek a balance between quality and affordability to achieve its goal of getting millions of additional consumers to install the bulbs.

Victor Roberts, an independent expert in Burnt Hills, N.Y., who conducts failure analysis testing on compact fluorescents, suspects that some suppliers  are using substandard components.

“Somebody decides to save a little money somewhere,” he said, “and suddenly we have hundreds of thousands of failures.”

The Program for the Evaluation and Analysis of Residential Lighting at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., tests Energy Star-certified bulbs to see if they still meet requirements.

In the 2007-8 tests, five of 29 models failed to meet specifications for such categories as lifespan, luminosity and on-off cycling and were removed from Energy Star’s list of qualified products. 

Because of performance concerns, the government is expanding the watchdog program, vowing to test samples of 20 percent of the thousands of certified bulb models each year.

In California, where bulbs have been heavily encouraged, utilities have concluded that they will not be able to persuade a majority of consumers to switch until compact fluorescents get better. That is prompting them to develop specifications for a better bulb.

The effort aims to address the most consumer complaints: poor dimming, slow warm-up times, shortened bulb life because of high temperatures inside enclosed fixtures, and dissatisfaction with the color of the light.

“Because of the aggressive goals in California, we have to be pushing the envelope at all times,” said Roland Risser, director of customer efficiency at Pacific Gas and Electric.

Experts and bulb manufacturers say that consumers need to play a role in solving the problems by learning more about the limitations of compact fluorescent bulbs. The Federal Trade Commission has begun to study whether it should force improvements in the labels of the bulbs.

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Dimmer Compatibility Sheets

Below are Dimmer Compatibility Sheets. You can search by brand and model number.  Click on one of the page numbers below.   Hope this helps…

 

1 2 3 4 5 6

 

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LED Dimmer Compatibility.

How many are aware of it?

All manufactures have these list. Most list share a lot of the same information.The list cover Dimmable LED and Dimmable MR16 LED's.

The list is interesting because it not only has the compatible Dimmers but also describes the symptoms of those that are not compatible.

Better know or to ask about the dimmer before sending that LED product to the customer.

And yes the reason for sharing this is because it does happen.

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Official line

In an email to Gizmag, an EPA spokesperson confirmed the certification process. "To earn the label, the manufacturer of the product must be an Energy Star partner and obtain third-party certification of the product based on testing in an EPA-recognized lab," the EPA said. "The requirements for LED bulbs address efficiency as well as a number of performance related metrics such as light distribution, durability, lumen maintenance and color quality (both initially and over time). Higher lumen products are eligible for certification, as long as they meet all the requirements and complete all the necessary testing."

It sounds as if a number of Energy Star LED products, 100-W equivalent A-lamps and otherwise, are headed for the market. This can only be a good thing. For LED products, Energy Star has set robust guidelines that should ensure that an Energy Star bulb is of high quality. Provided consumers know what to look for, perhaps LED can avoid the demonization that befell compact fluorescents.

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The floodgates open?

But why is Philips' product the only "100-W equivalent" to have been certified? "They won't necessarily be the only one, because it's just a matter of when companies are able to start their testing," Rosenfield said. "The longest lead time of this whole process is the four and a half months initially for the LM-80 testing for at least a half the full test […] assuming you're working with an LED manufacturer that has already done their testing."

Are Switch products going to be certified in the near future? "As a matter of fact we'll shortly be announcing the first set of our products that will be Energy Star qualified," said Rosenfield. "We're within days of that."

Though Switch has had products on the market for some time, it's worth bearing in mind that Switch is a start-up company whereas Philips is one of the world's largest lighting manufacturers – not to mention one which manufacturers its own LEDs.

Osram Sylvania is another company with apparently eligible products. We asked it if Energy Star certification was on the cards. "The EnergyStar qualification is a very rigorous test with tight parameters," a spokesperson told Gizmag. "Some of the screw-based LED bulbs need to be tested for at least 6,000 hours (for example) and this can take up to nine months – which is why some of our bulbs have not been qualified yet."

Though we also reached out to GE about its LED products, they declined to respond.

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Quality control

Though LEDs may not generate heat to the extent of other light sources, they are very sensitive to heat, so equally, just as a well-designed light bulb might extend an LED's longevity, might a poorly designed one compromise it? "I think that many companies fall out of the Energy Star qualification process because of that, because they don't have sufficient thermal management which is one of our big advantages," Rosenfield said, alluding to the LQD liquid cooling system employed in Switch's bulbs.

"Also companies fall out because they don't have the full light distribution required. For example, with an 'A lamp,' you have to have, to get the full Energy Star standard, 170 degrees of radial flux or light distribution all around the product at generally the same intensity all the way around," he added.

To pass the Energy Star benchmarks, Rosenfield concludes, products must perform robustly as well as demonstrate long life. He also explained that the EPA will pick up Energy Star-certified products in the market place to ensure that their performance matches what was certified – that the products are what they're being sold as, effectively.

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Ageism

"The other test […] is purely a life test," he added. "And in our category that test is run for 6,000 hours, so it's effectively nine straight months of testing." Life test is a useful if loose euphemism for what the test actually measures, which is lumen depreciation: the extent to which the lamp's light output falls over time.

"All LED lights at some point are going to start losing the amount of lumens that come out of the light," Rosenfield said. "The industry has set a number, called L70, which basically represents 70 percent of the original light output, as the end of life for an LED." So, the industry defines an LED light bulb as dead when its output falls to 70 percent of what it was to begin with.

The problem, Rosenfield explained, is that LED light bulbs haven't been around long enough for the industry to have a good understanding of how their performance degrades over time. Instead an algorithm is used which, after 6,000 hours of testing, projects the number of hours remaining before the LED will reach L70. The 25,000-hour rated life of Switch's and other LED products has not been tested in full because doing so would take nearly three years. Instead this number is a projection based on the algorithm used. Even so, it's still a test that takes a significant amount of time. Depreciation, by the way, is non-linear, and light output can at times increase as well as fall away, Rosenfield explained.

There is a semi-shortcut, though. LED light bulbs are effectively electronics packages in which the LEDs are but one type of component. Being solid state lighting products themselves, the LEDs are eligible for testing under IES LM-80. If Cree, one of the LED manufacturers Switch has used for its bulbs, has its LEDs tested to 6,000 hours, Switch doesn't have to repeat the entire test. Switch's product can instead undergo a 3,000-hour (4.5-month) test to check that depreciation follows the expected pattern. "It's still an advantage to test for the entire 6,000 hours because we may be able to run longer than what the LEDs actually are claiming," Rosenfield said.

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A tale of two tests: why Energy Star LED light bulbs are a rare breed

Just over a week ago we reported that Philips' 22 W LED light bulb, designed as a like-for-like replacement of a 100-W incandescent light bulb, was the first LED bulb of its type to receive the stamp of approval from Energy Star. But looking at the Energy Star requirements reported by Philips in its press release, it seemed a little strange that Philips' product is the only one to have been certified – given that products long on the market appear, at face value, to meet those requirements. Since then, Gizmag has spoken to LED light bulb makers Switch Lighting and other industry players to find out why they're apparently playing catch-up.

"Those who do not remember the past …"

It turns out the reason is simple, but has a little bit of back-story attached. Unlike Energy Star certification for other types of appliances, an Energy Star-certified LED light bulb signifies reliability and performance as well as energy-saving performance. The reason for the difference is down to the problems faced by ordinary people when compact fluorescent bulbs first appeared.

"Originally, the Department of Energy was very concerned about what happened with compact fluorescent lighting when it first entered the market in that there were all kinds of variations of quality, reliability and performance," Gary Rosenfield, EVP of Marketing & National Accounts at Switch Lighting told Gizmag. (Though the lighting aspects of Energy Star now fall under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency, when it came to specifying Energy Star criteria for LED products, it was the DoE.)

The result has been something of a minor backlash against compact fluorescent lighting, though in reality this was more down to the shortcomings of individual products and the misleading ways in which they were sometimes sold. The DoE was keen to avoid a repeat performance when LEDs arrived, since LED products also vary enormously in quality. The relevant tests, devised by the Illuminating Engineering Society, are known as IES LM-79 and IES LM-80. A manufacturer that wants to apply for Energy Star certification must first pay an approved independent laboratory to carry out the tests on its behalf. With the results in hand, the manufacturer can then apply to the EPA (provided they're up to scratch, that is).

There is no fee for applying for Energy Star certification, nor for using the label. In fact the tests in themselves do not specify pass or fail results, but instead simply quantify performance and lifespan. It's the EPA that decides the benchmarks. Light output depends on the bulb's spec, but is a minimum of 1,600 lumens for bulbs purporting equivalence to a 100-W incandescent bulb. Among the other criteria are color rendering index of at least 80, and a rated life of at least 25,000 hours – more on that in a moment.

"The LM-79 is basically the test that defines the photometrics, in other words that defines what the light performance is," Rosenfield said. LM-79 quantifies light output and distribution, as well as electrical power, allowing the calculation of the all-important efficacy in lumens/watts. It also identifies the light's color characteristics, such as its appearance, and its ability to render colors accurately.

"That's a fairly short test to run," Rosenfield explained. "It's done with spheres in independent labs. You put the product into these spheres, very expensive test equipment that basically encloses the entire fixture, and it tests all those variables." Easy peasy.

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"Blue" Light Could Help Teenagers Combat Stress

Short-Wavelength Light Increases Beneficial Stress Hormone Response in Sleep-Restricted Adolescents

Adolescents can be chronically sleep deprived because of their inability to fall asleep early in combination with fixed wakeup times on school days. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), almost 70 percent of school children get insufficient sleep—less than 8 hours on school nights. This type of restricted sleep schedule has been linked with depression, behavior problems, poor performance at school, drug use, and automobile accidents. A new study from the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that exposure to morning short-wavelength “blue” light has the potential to help sleep-deprived adolescents prepare for the challenges of the day and deal with stress, more so than dim light.
Levels of cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, follow a daily 24-hour rhythm. Cortisol concentrations are low throughout the day reaching a broad minimum in the evening before rising slowly again throughout the night. In addition to this gradual elevation of cortisol at night, cortisol levels rise sharply within the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking. This is known as the cortisol awakening response (CAR). In nocturnal animals, the cortisol spike occurs at night, at the start of activity. It appears to be associated with the time of transition from rest to activity, upon waking. A high CAR has been associated with better preparedness for stressful and challenging activities.
“The present results are the first to show that low levels of short-wavelength light enhance CAR in adolescents who were restricted from sleep,” said Figueiro. “Morning light exposure may help to wake up the body when it is time to be active, thus preparing individuals for any environmental stress they might experience.”
“We found that exposure to short-wavelength blue light in the morning significantly enhances CAR in sleep deprived adolescents, more so than dim light,” said Rea. “Morning exposure to short-wavelength light may be a simple, yet practical way to better prepare adolescents for the challenges of the day.”

How can teenagers get morning exposure to blue light? According to Figueiro and Rea, light exposure needs to occur within one hour of waking to have an impact on CAR. Blue light is available in daylight, but in winter, it is often dark when teens are waking up for school, due to later sunrise. More consistent options include blue light goggles and light boxes. Backlit tablets and computer screens provide blue light, but further research is needed to accurately measure how much light is produced by each product. Compared with light goggles or a light box, backlit tablets and computer screens provide a weaker light, and therefore would need to be used for a longer period of time to get the same effect. 

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Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Die Faster Than Thought

Compact fluorescent light bulbs are promoted as revolutionary power-saving devices—able to produce more light with less juice and last for nearly 10 years. But a review of conservation measures undertaken by California—a state that adopted CFLs more enthusiastically than any other—shows the bulbs to be a little disappointing, reports the Wall Street Journal. CFLs were supposed to last 9.4 years, according to initial projections by California's PG&E, but that's now been revised to 6.3 years.

The bulbs burn out even faster in locations such as bathrooms and in recessed lighting, or when they're turned on and off frequently. They're still more efficient than the soon-to-be-gone incandescent bulbs, but considering that California utilities are shelling out $548 million over seven years to subsidize consumer purchases, the less-than-hoped-for results take a toll. "What California has learned, in a nutshell, is that it is hard to accurately predict and tricky to measure energy savings," writes the Journal.

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