Time for some LED tech
Metal Oxide Varistors (MOV) play a very important role in protecting the LED lamp.
Its just another component of the LED driver that can be sacrificed to save cost. But not a good idea. Buyer Beware. It’s what’s inside that counts.
Learn more about MOV’s LED Circuit protection. Information your competition most likely won't know about.
See attached PDF Technical Sheet.
Includes a BONUS Youtube link of a teardown of a competitor product. 10 minutes long but the good stuff is in the last 5 minutes.
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Six, it turns out. And it’s a full-time job.
On Tuesday, those wiremen — their official title — unscrewed the last remaining incandescent bulbs in the building, replacing them with compact fluorescent bulbs and completing the greening of the lighting system at the bustling station.
While the wiremen worked, photographers snapped pictures, and officials applauded the efforts, reminiscing about the days when both station and light bulb were young.
The bulbs were on one of the 10 huge Beaux-Arts chandeliers in the main lobby. Adorned with gold detail and banded with 110 bulbs, the 96-year-old globe-shaped chandeliers hang above the main concourse balconies like luminescent Fabergé eggs.
Fluorescent bulbs last longer and use less energy, saving money and helping advance the city’s environmental goals.
They were first installed in the terminal in the mid-1980s, with tube-shaped fluorescents hung on the train platforms largely to brighten them, said Marjorie S. Anders, a spokeswoman for Metro-North Railroad. About seven years ago, compact fluorescents, which can be screwed into standard light sockets, were installed in the cornice that rings the ceiling of the main concourse, 75 feet above the ground, largely because frequently replacing the old bulbs was a risky and labor-intensive chore.
And as the technology and aesthetics improved — fluorescents became less distinguishable from incandescent bulbs and could be dimmed — the bulbs were added everywhere from the departure board to the chandeliers.
“If you see an incandescent bulb in this place, call me,” said Steve Stroh, the terminal’s electrical and mechanical superintendent, who has overseen the replacement effort. “We’ll have it changed, because we may have missed one or two.”
Replacing the roughly 4,000 bulbs in the public areas of the terminal — which doesn’t include the platforms, the train yards, or office space — will save an estimated $200,000 a year, Ms. Anders said.
Mr. Stroh would not even hazard a guess as to the number of bulbs throughout the terminal, which covers 48 acres, but he estimated that the annual light bulb budget was less than $100,000. Excluding labor, it costs about $1,100 to replace all the bulbs on a single chandelier, but the payback on that investment will take just months.
However, with the bulbs burning 24 hours a day, the shift from incandescent bulbs will not be putting any of the six wiremen out of work, Mr. Stroh said. Even with the fluorescents, he said, “it’s a big job.”
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For use in the lamps and light sockets of your home, LED bulbs have been slow to arrive, mainly because of their high price.
That’s a pity, because LED bulbs last longer and use less power than older ones, and with prices falling, a change makes even more sense, David Pogue writes in The New York Times.
LED bulbs are a gigantic improvement over incandescent bulbs and even the compact fluorescents, or CFLs, that the world spent several years telling us to buy. LEDs last about 25 times as long as incandescents and three times as long as CFLs; we’re talking maybe 25,000 hours of light. Install one today, and you may not own your house, or even live, long enough to see it burn out. (Actually, LED bulbs generally don’t burn out at all; they just get dimmer.)
You know how hot incandescent bulbs become. That’s because they convert only 5 to 10 percent of your electricity into light; they waste the rest as heat. LED bulbs are far more efficient. They convert 60 percent of their electricity into light, so they consume far less electricity. You pay less, you pollute less.
But wait, there’s more: LED bulbs also turn on to full brightness instantly. They’re dimmable. The light color is wonderful; you can choose whiter or warmer bulbs. They’re rugged, too. It’s hard to break an LED bulb, but if the worst should come to pass, a special coating prevents flying shards.
Yet despite all of these advantages, few people install LED lights. They never get farther than: “$30 for a light bulb? That’s nuts!” Never mind that they will save about $200 in replacement bulbs and electricity over 25 years. (More, if your electric company offers LED-lighting rebates.)
Surely there’s some price, though, where that math isn’t so off-putting. What if each bulb were only $15? Or $10? Well, guess what? We’re there. LED bulbs now cost less than $10.
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For the first time, a majority of Americans now know that federal legislation will eliminate “most traditional incandescent lighting by 2014,” according to a new survey conducted by the lighting manufacturer Osram Sylvania.The first step in getting people to change the way they consume energy is making them aware that change is afoot. When it comes to lighting technologies, in particular, it seems that consumer awareness is growing.
The poll found that 55 percent of respondents were aware of that fact, up from 36 percent in 2010 and 26 percent in 2009.
“Americans are increasingly prepared for this lighting transition,” said Stephanie Anderson, a spokeswoman for Osram Sylvania. She said the survey also showed that 62 percent of those polled had swapped out a light bulb over the last year to increase energy efficiency.
Still, when it comes down to details, people are less clear about what is going to happen beginning in January.
Only 29 percent understood that it is the 100-watt incandescent lamp that will no longer be manufactured starting in 2012. (While its manufacture will be forbidden, the sale of existing stock will be allowed.)
Under the new legislation, lamps that produce the approximate brightness of a 100-watt bulb can only use 72 watts to do so. In 2013, when traditional 75-watt lamps can no longer be manufactured, their substitutes can only use 53 watts of energy to produce the same amount of light.
In California, the same rules are being put into effect a year earlier.
While only 13 percent of respondents said they were using LED light sources as replacements for regular bulbs, 80 percent of those surveyed said they had heard of them. Only 68 percent were aware that the compact fluorescent lamp, or C.F.L., exists.
For those who want to replace 100-watt standard lamps with energy-saving varieties, consumers can now choose between C.F.L.’s and halogen lamps. While C.F.L.’s use less energy and last longer, halogen lamps will create light that is closer to that from incandescent bulbs.
LED lamps that produce as much light as a 100-watt bulb are not yet available; many companies plan to sell them next year. LEDs that create the equivalent of a 40-, 60- or 75-watt standard bulb are readily available today, although they can cost as much as $40.
Even with the new rules, it is likely that incandescent bulbs will be found in homes years from now. As in years past, the Osram Sylvania survey found that around 13 percent of those surveyed said they planned to hoard standard light bulbs.
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Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
Click the link below to read a summary of the Act passed in 2007 to move the United States toward greater energy independence.
https://www.govtrack.us/
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Nancy Finkelmeier tried to make the switch more than a year ago. After hearing that the long life of compact fluorescent bulbs would help her avoid changing the lights in her 15-foot ceilings so often, she got rid of her traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of the new ones.
Comparing the light quality of, from left, a Sunlight compact fluorescent bulb, a Cree LED, and a GE incandescent.
But there was a problem. “I don’t like that cool blue light that it emits,” said Ms. Finkelmeier, a retired nurse from Cincinnati.
So she made another switch, to bulbs using a different technology called the light-emitting diode, or LED. It’s a change that regulators and manufacturers, frustrated by consumer rejection of compact fluorescents, hope that others will make as well, especially the millions who have stuck with their energy-guzzling traditional incandescent bulbs, even hoarding them as stricter efficiency standards phase out most of them.
For several years, manufacturers have been making LED lights that increasingly mimic incandescents, while steadily bringing down their prices. Big-box retailers like Walmart are jumping into the market, offering their own brands of the bulbs, often for $10 or less.
Regulators are getting involved, too. The Environmental Protection Agency recently finished overhauling lighting standards for its Energy Star program, making it easier for more LEDs to qualify for generous discounts. And California, a leader in all things green, is going even further, with elaborate new requirements to control not just how much electricity the bulbs use but how the light feels.
“We want a lamp that people fall in love with,” said Gary Flamm, supervisor of the building standards development unit at the California Energy Commission, adding that with compact fluorescents the push toward low prices and high efficiency had sacrificed light quality. “Once they fall in love with it, they can all save significant energy over the incandescent.”
Nationwide, incandescent bulbs, including newer, more efficient halogen models, accounted for roughly 75 percent of general lighting sales this year, according to the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, a trade group, with compact fluorescents making up most of the balance. Manufacturers concede that early versions of the compact fluorescents did not meet expectations for light quality and longevity. Despite advances that have improved their performance, consumers still tick off a host of complaints about the squiggly bulbs: They take time to light up, they do not dim smoothly, they don’t fit with clip-on shades and, worst of all, they cast a harsh and unflattering light. They also contain mercury, raising concerns about breakage and disposal.
“I would, in a way, pay anything to avoid fluorescent,” said Laura Stein, an artist who was picking up several different LEDs to try from a Manhattan Home Depot last week. “I can’t stand them — I’ve always hated them and I will not use them.”
Millions of consumers have come to the same conclusion, even though compact fluorescent bulbs use about 75 percent less electricity than standard incandescents.
LEDs offer a different proposition. Until recently, customers like Ms. Stein could pay about $30 for a bulb — a significant premium even though electricity savings and a life span that extends into the decades can make up the difference in the long run. But several manufacturers — including well-known brands like General Electric, Osram Sylvania and Philips and newcomers like Cree — began offering bulbs for around $10 or less this year.
The drop in price has helped increase demand for them, retailers and manufacturers say, although they still represent only about 1 percent of the bulbs in American homes, according to industry estimates. In the last few years, LED sales have doubled at retailers like Home Depot and Bulbs.com, executives there said, reaching roughly 20 percent of their lighting totals.
Ms. Finkelmeier, for instance, said she was very happy with the warmer light from her LEDs as well as with the savings on her electric bills.
LED sales are expected to sharply increase, especially given the steep subsidies utilities pay manufacturers and distributors to bring prices even lower by the time the products reach the lighting aisle. “We want to invest heavy now because we feel this is where the future is going to be,” said Caroline Winn, vice president for customer services at San Diego Gas and Electric.
A display of Cree California-compliant bulbs being sold at a Home Depot store in Burbank.
The subsidies — which are ultimately paid by ratepayers — generally go only to lights carrying an Energy Star designation. To get it, compact fluorescents and LEDs must use only a certain amount of energy and meet a variety of other requirements, like dispersing light in all directions and accurately rendering the color of objects they illuminate, that make them seem more like traditional bulbs.
California is taking the color requirements, among others, for LEDs even further. The specifications are voluntary, but only bulbs that meet them can qualify for utility rebates, potentially giving them a price advantage over other bulbs, even those that meet Energy Star guidelines.
“We’re not going to spend public dollars on a lamp that doesn’t meet this,” Mr. Flamm said, “but people can still sell a noncompliant lamp in California.”
Manufacturers are split on whether to pursue making LEDs for the California market.
Cree, which began marketing LED bulbs this year, has a product on shelves that it says meets the specifications. Sylvania says it expects a number of its bulbs to qualify and General Electric says it is considering making one.
But Philips is taking a different approach, said Todd Manegold, director of LED lamps at Philips Lighting North America, dismissing the higher color standard as meaningless to customers. “What we’re focused on at the moment is actually making things like a typical 60-watt more affordable.”
Although the nation followed California in phasing out most standard bulbs, the federal government and other states may not follow this time.
“There is a place in the market for some of these high-color, high-quality products, but for the average consumer, I think it is perhaps not necessary,” said Dan Mellinger, lighting strategy manager of the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, which operates the state’s Efficiency Vermont energy conservation program. “Of course better color is always good — who wouldn’t want that? — but it comes at a surprisingly significant cost and efficiency penalty.”
European regulators have also been pushing consumers to switch to more efficient bulbs. Last year, the European Union completed its phaseout of 40-watt bulbs, the last common incandescent model still available.
In the end, consumers now face a bewildering choice. Customers who once walked into a store looking for a familiar measure of wattage are now being confounded by a dizzying array of technologies, shapes, brand names and hard-to-translate measures of brightness, energy consumption and appearance.
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TRADITIONAL but energy-thirsty incandescent Christmas lights are facing a dim future.
Holiday light bulbs were exempted from the federal law that’s phasing out other incandescent bulbs, and that seemingly ensured that they could keep decorating trees, decking halls and providing seasonal cheer. But now they’re being put to a test as fearsome as a government regulation: competition.
Light-emitting diode (LED)—super-efficient lights that use a lot less energy than incandescents—have been around for years. LED creates light by moving electrons over a semiconductor material, instead of heating up a filament, as a traditional bulb does.
LED technology was expensive, which limited the lights’ appeal, but prices have dropped dramatically. A couple of years ago, LEDs to replace a 60-watt bulb cost $40, but they can now be found for under $10.
And LED Christmas lights are cheap enough that the larger ones save enough energy compared with incandescents that most of their purchase cost can be recovered within a year.
The shift is showing up at stores, which are selling more of the efficient lights. Walmart is devoting half of its shelf space for Christmas lights to LEDs and offering a string of 50 mini LED lights for $5, down from $6.30 last year.
“We know our customers are gravitating toward them,” said Debbie Serr, a Walmart spokesman.
Costco is selling no incandescent Christmas lights at all.
General Electric, which has peddled holiday lighting for more than a century, expects that two out of every five strings of lights sold this year will be LEDs.
Sales of the lights were up 50 percent last year at the Light Bulbs Etc. store in Lenexa, Kansas, and while it’s too early to say how they’ll do this season, sales are expected to be strong again.
“I think eventually we’ll see Christmas incandescents go away,” said Larry Fuqua, general manager of the store.
ChristmasLightInstaller.com, which sells, rents and installs Christmas lights in several cities, including Kansas City, says that 30 percent of new customers are migrating to LEDs.
A Christmas without incandescent lights on a tree? That would end an era that stretches back to the invention of the first successful and practical light bulb.
Thomas Edison, the inventor, is also credited with first using them as Christmas decorations when he strung some bulbs outside his laboratory in 1880. A couple of years later, an associate used electric lights to decorate a Christmas tree. That was soon copied by the wealthy, who could afford a price tag of up to $2,000 in today’s dollars to decorate just one tree, according to the Library of Congress.
That changed in 1903, when General Electric introduced preassembled Christmas lights, and other companies rushed in to snag some of the business.
Noma Electric Co., which would corner the market for Christmas lights, is credited with making them an iconic part of the holidays. Worried about sales in the Great Depression, the company featured nostalgic advertisements of families gathered around a lighted tree. Sales rose and the company survived. (Noma went bankrupt in the 1960s because of foreign imports.)
Today’s nostalgic moments are increasingly being lit with LEDs, which can save about 80 percent or more of the energy used by incandescent bulbs.
Compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) are still the main energy-efficient option for other lighting, such as 60-watt bulbs for lamps. They don’t save as much energy as LEDs, but they’re cheaper to buy. But LEDs are expected to make inroads in that market as their price declines.
CFLs aren’t suitable as replacements for Christmas lights, making LEDs the alternative for energy efficiency.
Holiday lights would seem an unlikely target for a push to save energy. They’re used a few hours a day over at most a couple of months and then packed and put away. But during that short period, they use enough electricity to provide power to 200,000 homes for a year, according to a US Department of Energy study.
Terry McGowan, director of engineering and technology for the American Lighting Association, said no one expected to see LED prices fall so fast. But he saw the effect earlier this year when he stepped into a trade show where retailers purchased Christmas lights to sell this holiday season and found most of them being offered were LEDs.
“We are going to see a lot of action,” he said.
The economic payoff from LEDs varies considerably. LEDs replacing small incandescent bulbs still take a few years to recover their extra cost. But the larger the incandescent bulb and the energy usage, the more an LED can save.
Costco is selling several sizes of Christmas LEDs, and one of the largest, used for outside and indoor displays, costs $15.50 for a set. If used for six hours per day over two months, based on local electricity prices they’ll save $11 over their incandescent brethren in just the first season.
Toss in the fact that LEDs are more durable and last roughly 10 times longer than incandescents, and you have a pretty good deal.
But McGowan said a good payback isn’t the top priority for buyers of Christmas lights. They have to first look good. LEDs have good blue and red colors, and there has been a big improvement in white LEDs, although they can still have some greenish-blue tint.
Some bastions of Christmas tradition have fallen to LEDs. In Santa Claus, Indiana, where they like to say every day is Christmas, the town is getting ready for its annual Christmas-light show with more than 300 displays covering 1.2 miles. The lights are LEDs, and they think they look fine.
REF: Business Mirror
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BETTER GUIDANCE Engineers with the Lighting Science Group Corporation, Mark Oostdyk, right, and Ran Zhou, testing road lights.
AFTER the joy of the birth itself, parenthood sometimes brings the unwelcome news that a newborn has jaundice and must wear goggles and be placed under special lights. Imagine how different this experience might be if there were no goggles, just a warm blanket covering the tiny body, a healing frequency of blue light emanating from its folds.
That comforting scene, already a reality in some hospitals, is evidence of the fundamental rethinking of lighting now under way in research labs, executive offices and investor conferences. Digital revolutionaries have Edison’s 130-year-old industry, and its $100 billion in worldwide revenue, in their sights. Color, control and function are all being reassessed, and new players have emerged like a wave of Silicon Valley start-ups.
“This is the move from the last industrial-age analog technology to a digital technology,” said Fred Maxik, the chief technology officer with the Lighting Science Group Corporation, one of many newer players in the field.
The efforts start with energy efficiency and cost savings but go far beyond replacing inefficient incandescent bulbs. Light’s potential to heal, soothe, invigorate or safeguard people is being exploited to introduce products like the blanket, versions of which are offered by General Electricand in development at Philips, the Dutch electronics giant.
Innovations on the horizon range from smart lampposts that can sense gas hazards to lights harnessed for office productivity or even to cure jet lag. Digital lighting based onlight-emitting diodes — LEDs — offers the opportunity to flit beams delicately across stages like the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge — creating a light sculpture more elegant than the garish marketers’ light shows on display in Times Square, Piccadilly Circus and the Shibuya district in Tokyo.
“Up till now we only thought — do I have enough light to see, to clean my room, to cut a diamond?” said Ed Crawford, a senior vice president of Philips Lighting Americas. “Now it impacts what I do, how I feel, in emotional ways.”
In the United States, lighting consumes more than 20 percent of electric power generated each year; the Energy Department says LEDs can cut consumption by up to 80 percent. LEDs — also called solid-state lighting — are already a $12.5 billion business worldwide, according to analysts at the research firm Strategies Unlimited in Mountain View, Calif. A 2012 McKinsey report estimates LEDs will be an $84 billion business by 2020.
But there is an obstacle or two facing the LED revolutionaries. One is existing modes of lighting: Edison’s screw-based socket, the office’s fluorescent ceiling tubes, and metal halide or sodium lights in parking lots are not going away anytime soon.
Another hurdle is public wariness after the environmental exhortations of the 2000s, which led to much-disputed federal legislation to phase out the old incandescents, often in favor of compact fluorescent bulbs. In pursuing their goals, advocates played down problems like the harshness of fluorescent light, and difficulties with dimming the bulbs and dealing with the toxic mercury they contain. Now, some lighting scientists say, both consumers and investors are leery of buying into something they suspect might be substandard.
Another powerful force for continuity is the psychological legacy of light as we know it — from sun to candle to bulb. Isn’t the cartoon shorthand for a new idea a glowing bulb over the thinker’s head?
So some companies are selling the new digital lighting in forms that will fit into the prerevolutionary world, with its sockets and streetlamps — including familiar bulb shapes.
Philips is producing a bulb called Hue that fits into the old sockets and not only dims and brightens, but also changes colors on command. Mr. Crawford said that in his lamps division, 25 percent of sales income now comes from LEDs; he expects it to increase to 50 percent in two years. In 2008, that number was close to zero.
One reason adoption will speed up, Mr. Crawford believes, is that in recent years, consumers have been asked to compromise on quality to get energy savings. With the latest generation of LEDs, he said, “the consumer gets the energy savings without compromise.”
The cost barrier is getting lower. Until recently, it typically cost $30 to buy an LED that could replace a 60-watt glass incandescent bulb bought for less than a dollar. Now Cree, a semiconductor manufacturer, has 40-watt and 60-watt LED equivalents for $10 and $14.
James Highgate, an expert on the new technology who runs an annual LED industry conference, sees a transition period ahead “for the next three to five years, until the eight billion sockets in the U.S. get filled” with LEDs. “Some people will never change,” he added. “They’ll be in the alleys buying 100-watt incandescents.”
But a new poll done by the lighting company Osram Sylvania showed that fewer consumers were listing “burned out or broken” as the main reason for switching bulb formats. According to a company news release, “68 percent of Americans say they have switched lighting for increased energy efficiency.”
Energy efficiency is only the beginning, according to experts on the lighting innovations. Take communication between lights. At the University of California, Davis, a bike path illuminated at night with a “just in time” system has one light node alerting another and another down the line as a bicycle goes by, progressively lighting the rider’s way, then dimming back into an energy-saving mode.
FROM THE LAB Lighting Science is working to improve things like streetlights, top.
Michael Siminovitch, director of the California Lighting Technology Center at the university, said that with the new technology “we’re going to be able to create a variety of control features in terms of how we introduce points of light in space, but we’re also going to be able to do it with planes and areas of light.” For example, he said, there could be light-generating ceilings or walls.
Engineers like Mr. Maxik at Lighting Science are now imagining cities that light their streets as needed, without benefit of lampposts. He has created a fixture that could replace the reflective medians in highways south of the snow belt. Once installed along the road’s centerline, they provide as much illumination as streetlamps. The metal and wiring that go into the streetlamp would be unnecessary.
Lighting Science has teamed up with Google to develop a light bulb — soon to be available — that is controllable with an Android phone app.
But just as it will take consumers a while to give up familiar light sockets for lights embedded in walls or ceilings, it is likely to take cities and their public works departments some time to give up their lampposts.
Recognizing this, other companies, like the newly renamed Sensity Systems (formerly Xeralux) are reimagining lampposts as nodes in a smart network that illuminate spaces, visually monitor them, sense heat and communicate with other nodes and human monitors.
In addition to such functions — which could raise privacy concerns, though perhaps less so after the Boston Marathon bombings — the new systems could sharply cut the cost of street lighting. The data could be sold to app developers who could create, say, an app to help find parking.
The idea, said the company’s chief executive, Hugh Martin, is “wherever there’s a light, there’s data being generated.”
Mr. Maxik said: “It’s the convergence of the light source, the novel controls we can apply to it and the ability to program it which makes solid-state lighting as a category unique. That becomes the enabler of the new forms and new functions.”
Many of the elements of the nascent revolution seem in place. A host of relatively new entrants — Lighting Science, Eye Lighting, Ohm Lighting and TerraLUX among them — are moving into what had been a market dominated by large, established companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania.
In both the newer and older camps, researchers are trying to reimagine uses for light and ways of controlling it. What kinds of controls? Adjusting the intensity of a light between dim and bright, of course, has been done for decades — but not often in outdoor settings. Other options, indoors and out, include changing the frequency and color of the light, or having it pulsate — think of the multicolor displays atop the Empire State Building.
This color-changing capability has applications far beyond the theatrical. Consider sea turtle hatchlings leaving nests along the Florida coast that are led astray by bright white lights, luring them inland when they should head seaward. Lighting Science is one ofseveral companies that offer a solution; its $29.99 amber “turtle lights” are on sale in Satellite Beach, Fla., near the most active turtle nesting area.
For the workplace, Osram Sylvania’s researchers are looking to control light to improve office productivity. As Lori Brock, director of research and innovation at the company’s technology lab in Massachusetts, said: “It optimizes the illumination for the task you’re doing. If you sat at your desk to use the computer, maybe the overhead light would dim, increasing the contrast so you could see better. Other lights could go to an energy-saving hue.” Ideally, productivity increases while energy costs decrease.
As for health applications, the Lighting Research Center of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has focused its research on the physiological and psychological impacts of light. This might lead to light fixtures in hotel rooms and elsewhere that enhance sleep or restore the circadian rhythms of jet-lagged travelers.
Philips’s lighting division is working on a product that allows people with psoriasis to have light treatments at home, not in the hospital. It has also introduced a blue-light-emitting poultice to relieve muscle pain by releasing the nitric oxide in the patient’s system, stimulating blood flow.
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Philips Hue Connected Bulb starter pack review:
The good: Philips' Hue Connected Bulb lets you change the color of your lightbulbs and control them from your phones. It's easy to use, and — most importantly — nails the basics.
The bad: Three-bulbs-and-a-hub is expensive at $199, the novelty factor will wear off for many users quickly, and Android users apparently come in second on Philips' app development priority list.
The bottom line: You might not have an obvious need for an Internet-connected, color-changing light bulb, but the Philips Hue Connected Bulb kit offers enough potential to justify its high price tag.
Like many of the new breed of user-installable, smartphone-controlled home tech products, the WiFi-connected Philips Hue lighting kit has high geek/novelty appeal. After all, it's a color-changing, LED light bulb package you can program from a smartphone. But beyond its remote on/off and scheduling functions you'll need to get really into the extended features–like geofencing and IFTTT support–to make this kit worth $199.
Those features won't appeal universally, but they will have their niche fans. What house party DJ or dorm room Lothario wouldn't love an automated, multihued mood-setter? For the hyper-connected, setting the lights to blink with every retweet could also be a draw. By smartly allowing the public to make its own apps for the Hue, Philips has also left the doors of possibility wide open.
Even if you don't appreciate the Hue's advanced features now, someone might one day write an app for it that perfectly fills some unrealized need. I wouldn't recommend the Philips Hue Connected Bulb kit if all you want is basic remote lighting controls, but it's a reliable, mostly easy-to-use choice if you want to inject some intelligence into your home lighting scheme.
The Philips Hue Connected Bulb Starter Kit includes three LED light bulbs and the Hue Bridge. The Bridge is a hub that plugs directly into your wireless router and translates signals between your Wi-Fi-connected smartphone and the ZigBee-based bulbs.
You might wish Philips had found a way to eliminate the Bridge, like the purely Wi-Fi-based Lifx bulbs or Bluetooth-based iLumi. Those bulbs cost $89 and $79 a piece, respectively, which means that Philips' ZigBee-based solution, ($59 per when you buy them individually), seems to impart some cost savings. You can always pick up an extra-long Ethernet cable and hide the Bridge in a closet somewhere if you find it unsightly. If you think you'll expand into other connected home products like a Sonos system, or a smart lock or two, keep an eye on the forthcoming multidevice controller hubs that support Hue, like the one included with theLogitech Harmony Ultimate universal remote, or the Revolv Smart Home Solution Wi-Fi Hub due out later this year.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rich Brown/CNET)
Once you've connected the Bridge and installed a few bulbs, you simply download and install the free Philips iOS or Android app, which will then prompt you to hit the Bridge's sync button. The app, Bridge, and bulbs should all find each other a few seconds later. Since the Hue kit has been on the market since fall 2012, you might receive a Bridge with outdated firmware. You can use the app to check, but you might also need to cycle the power once or twice before you get an accurate reading.
The official Hue app is not the most intuitive piece of software. Its primary screen displays a grid of preset lighting schemes ("recipes," per Philips) designed for all three light bulbs. Some recipes, like Reading, or Concentration, trigger familiar, utilitarian shades of white and yellow light. Others — Sunset, Deep Sea, Kathy (?) — dip into the spectrum of 16 million colors available to the Hue.
Select any of those presets and your bulbs will change almost instantly. Selecting also launches an onscreen brightness slider, framed by buttons to edit the preset, and to turn it off. Philips will let you monitor lights, adjust their brightness, and turn them on or off remotely once you've signed up and logged into the Web-based client. To make new presets or edit existing ones, you have to be on your home network.
Editing and creating new presets is where the Philips app experience can become cumbersome. Philips has spread the various customization functions across different sections of the app. The settings icon presents you with a simple, per-bulb color selection tool. But when you go to make a preset lighting scheme, Philips only lets you assign colors by choosing them from a reference image file. You can pull images from your photo library, or capture them in the app directly, or even download them from Philips' Web site, but without that source image, you have no way obvious way to assign a particular shade to a preset.
Once you do pick a color set, the app lets you assign specific behaviors easily enough. iOS users currently have more-robust options here than their Android-based counterparts (Philips says it's working on tying app development schedules more closely together.)
On the Android Hue app, you get the per-bulb lighting and brightness options, as well as basic scheduling. With the upgraded version 1.1 iOS app, Philips brings in advanced programming functions like the ability to set timed alarms. It also introduces geofencing, which will work in conjunction with your smartphone GPS to turn your lights off when you leave your home, and turn them back on when you return.
If Philips' app isn't perfect, it exposes enough features to make the Hue Connected Bulb interesting. Search "Hue" in the Apple Store or in Google Play, and you'll find apps that let you do even more.
Thanks to Philips releasing the Hue API and a software development kit for iOS and Android, you will find all kinds of alternative Hue apps available for download. Many of these are improved versions of the basic control screen. Hue Pro for Android and its intuitive interface is a good example, since it lets you set presets and see how they will affect every bulb right on the home screen. Other apps, like Ambify, Hue Music, and Hue Market, expand the Hue's programming functions to changing colors in time to music, or in response to changes in the stock market.
Like Belkin's WeMo home automation devices, the Hue also has its own IFTTT channel. IFTTT (If This, Then That) is an Internet-based standard that lets you tie online services to each other. The idea is that through a simple interface, you can create "recipes" that perform simple functions. You can then use your own recipes, or download recipes from others to do things like automatically back up your iPhone contacts to a Google Drive spreadsheet, or have a weather report show up automatically as a text message every morning.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rich Brown/CNET)
Sign up for the Philips Hue channel on IFTTT's app or Web site, and you will find almost 500 different recipes. Some will seem frivolous ("Upload a photo to Facebook and set the mood in the room"), but many of them offer simple, but still useful notifications, like blinking the lights when you've been tagged in a Facebook photo, or changing colors to those of your favorite team when the game starts.
Along with all that potential, one pitfall is that with so many disparate apps triggering different lighting behaviors, it can be hard to track them all. If you're sick of a particular recipe or program setting, you might have to sort through three or four different apps before you find it to shut it down.
For all of that new-fangled connectedness, it's most important that the Philips Hue bulbs meet our basic expectations for standard home lighting. The good news is that they do.
The white, yellow, and blue-toned lighting (accessible via the Concentrate, Energize, Reading, and Relax presets) all have the familiar warmth and color tone of standard incandescent or utility bulbs. Each 8.5-watt, 600 lumen Hue bulb can shine with the intensity of a 50-watt incandescent. A single, undimmed bulb won't sufficiently light an entire 12×12-foot room, but two Hue bulbs should do the job.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rich Brown/CNET)
You also don't need to worry about the range of a bulb from the Bridge. With the controller on one end of our appliance testing warehouse, and a bulb at the other, we put about 100 feet and five or six walls between them. We noticed no significant delay in responsiveness. A 1,500-square-foot house might put that many walls and a floor or two between the two pieces, but the longest distance might be more like 50 or 75 feet apart.
At $49 a pop if you purchase them individually, or $199 for the kit, the Philips Hue Connected Bulb has some useful conveniences, but it's also packed with some likely short-lived novelty. It's expensive compared with a CFL or a old school incandescent bulb. It's even pricier than many other LED bulbs, although not all of the Hue's competition is connected, nor as feature-rich. You can buy a $129 home automation hub from Insteon, for example, and one of that company's LED bulbs for $29, but they don't offer as many color options as the Hue. They're also not IFTTT-compatible.
On the higher-end, the Hue will face broader competition from companies like Lifx and its $89 Wi-Fi-based, hub-free light bulb, as well as the Bluetooth-based iLumi. Neither is in wide release yet, but both had successful crowd-funding campaigns, and should be ramping up production shortly. The novelty factor will make any of these bulbs a hard sell for some consumers. If you like the idea, though, the Philips Hue Connected Bulb nails the basics of lighting and ease of use, and also supports a robust set of extend functions. It's the connected LED light bulb to beat, particularly if you're an iOS user.
REF: CNET
Commercial Lighting Tampa FL, 813-935-4448 / 813-514-1266
CommercialLightingTampa.com, 8139354448 / 8135141266
Customers are not happy with the new changes made by the Department of Energy (DOE) to the Halogen PAR Lamps back on July 14, 2012. The main complaint is that the new bulbs do not last as long due to the changes in the ratings from 6000 hours (130V) to 1500 hours (120V) mandated by the DOE. There are alternatives with the 2500 hour and 4000 hour bulbs but most do not want to pay more, for a little more life.
Following are some facts explaining the changes and advantages.
Commercial Lighting Tampa FL, 813-935-4448 / 813-514-1266
CommercialLightingTampa.com, 8139354448 / 8135141266
813-514-1266
813-935-4448
8135141266
8139354448
