Consumer Reports Gave The Thumbs-up to Three LED Lamps

Consumer Reports gave the thumbs-up to three LED lamps, an NEEA team will investigate street-light visibility, Novaled founders were nominated for an innovation award, and Astronics has begun installing SSL on the taxiways of US Air Force bases.

Consumer Reports tests CFLs and LED lamps
Consumer Reports, a Yonkers, NY-based magazine that evaluates consumer products, tested 20 CFLs and 10 LED lamps, some for as long as 9000 hours, and came up with a positive recommendation for three 60 W-equivalent LED lamps.

Philips AmbientLED

The Consumer Reports staff recommended three 60 W-equivalent LED lamps including the Philips AmbientLED 12.5 W (see picture) designed for table or floor lamps and priced at $40, the EcoSmart 10.5 W LED for down lights priced at $50, and the EcoSmart PAR38 18 W for outdoor flood lights priced at $45.

The highest-performing LED lamp in the 40 to 50 W-equivalent category was the GE Energy Smart LED9A19 9 W lamp, priced at $40.

Consumer Reports decided to evaluate 60 W equivalent bulbs because they are the most popular type sold in the US. The study determined that CFLs typically pay for themselves within a year, and now contain less mercury, at around 1 mg/bulb, than they did in previous years.

Evaluation of the LED lamps showed that most lamps met the performance specifications provided by the manufacturers including correlated color temperature (K), light distribution, dimmability, functionality in an enclosed fixture, and energy usage. However, about half of the lamps did not demonstrate the brightness they had advertised. Four out of 100 LED lamps stopped working within the first 3000 hours of testing.

The full report is available on Consumer Reports' Facebook page at www. Facebook/com/consumerreports.

NEEA team investigates street light visibility

With street lighting, how much light is enough?

Members of the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) will seek the answer to this question and others with a new solid-state lighting and control system street-light demonstration project in Seattle, Washington this fall. Other participating team members include engineers and scientists from Continuum Industries (Anchorage, AK), a high-efficiency lighting and control system building firm, lighting designer Clanton & Associates (Boulder, CO), and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (Blacksburg, VA).

The study will build on prior tests conducted by the team in Anchorage, San Diego and San Jose, which suggested that visibility benefits from broad spectrum street lights could be maintained while dimming to 50% light levels for improved energy savings during certain hours. The Seattle study will also introduce new variables such as wet roads and asymmetric luminaires.

Novaled founders nominated for innovation award

The German Federal President Christian Wulff has nominated three Novaled founders for the Deutscher Zukunftspreis Award for Innovation and Technology. The award recognizes technologies that fundamentally change the working environment.

Fraunhofer Institute's Karl Leo

Karl Leo (pictured), Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth and Martin Pfeiffer developed OLED technologies that enabled more energy efficient luminaires and solar cells. Novaled is a spinoff of Fraunhofer-Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS), both based in Dresden, Germany.

"Together with my nominated colleagues and a great number of dedicated employees of the institutes and companies, we were able to successfully realize the transfer of a technology from basic research into products, " said Leo.

The award winner will be announced on December 14 in Berlin.

Astronics DME provides SSL to US Air Force base taxiways

In what could amount to a $7.4 million, 5-year contract, the Astronics DME Corporation Airfield Lighting Systems & NavAids segment (Ft. Lauderdale, FL) will use solid-state lighting to replace taxiway light fixtures at Air Force bases in the continental US, Alaska, and Hawaii. LED lighting experts from Astronics DME will begin the airport lighting contract immediately by replacing 600 lights in a $72, 000 order.

L-861T LED fixture delineates taxiway edges

Astronics designs and builds airfield taxiway and runway lights, including state-of-the-art LED fixtures, such as the blue LED omni-directional taxiway edge light to delineate the edges of airport taxiways, holding bays, and aprons; quartz lights for runway edge and non-precision instrument-flight-rules (IFR) runways; quartz high-intensity runway lights for runway edges and displaced thresholds; and elevated runway guard lights with dual alternating yellow light signals to enhance the visibility of taxiway holding positions at entrances to runways.

Replacing existing airport light fixtures with LED lighting should save energy and lower the Air Force's air base lifecycle maintenance and replacement costs, explains Peter Gundermann, Astronics' president and CEO.