I'm not the only one

There are a lot of interesting sustainability blogs. TreeHugger has a lot of good articles that run the gamut of the built environment. Most time I read an article there, I find myself thinking about lighting; I'm cursed not being able to get rid of it from my brain.

This article is really a whopper. Not only does it discuss why we stupid Americans build 2X the house we can ever use (well, not me, we own a 1300 sqft townhouse), it has a great phrase at the end; "... we need to properly price energy to create an incentive to conserve". Read that again. Think about it.

I have said this for 4-5 years. If energy was dollars per kWh instead of pennies, then everyone would have no choice but to stop using it. "We" focus on stupid concepts like ethanol in order to offset gasoline in cars when there is no way we ever solve the problem that way; it is a bandage on a shotgun wound. That logic leads us to twisty CFL "bulbs" that everyone seems to hate (mostly out of ignorance), but they use 1/4 the energy. Band-Aid. Why is the first step not mandatory occupancy sensors? Who cares what you have installed if you don't ever turn it on?

Right now, as much as the pundits would argue otherwise, I say we are still in an early-adopter phase of "green". Most people are doing anything along the sustainably intelligent lines because they want to hug trees. Global warming, blah blah blah. Who cares if it is real? Who cares if we are causing it? No matter what, we run out of coal. We run out of oil. We run out of natural gas. Doesn't matter if any of it is causing global warming. We. Run. Out. ... and your kids might be alive to see some of it. Your grandchildren certainly will be.

What we need is a different economic process. You want to keep your 100W incandescent? Fine by me. That will be $50 to buy it please. $49.50 of which goes to fund thin-film PV or something else. Why do we only have a ban on new probe-start metal halide? That causes phase-out in what, 20 years ... only happens when the pulse-start retrofit kit (or does LED leapfrog that?) is cheaper than the probe-start ballast that keeps failing. How do you get adoption of a more efficacious technology?

"... we need to properly price energy to create an incentive to conserve"

How many veggie burger luminaires do we have?

Read this blog from Car Talk. Jay Leno on cars is always interesting.

Have you heard the veggie burger theory? I hadn’t either, but it goes like this, according to Leno. “They make it look like a hamburger, but when you bite into it you go, ‘Phaaa, it doesn’t taste like a hamburger.’ Auto companies will take a Volkswagen Rabbit or something like that, pull the engine out, add in batteries, and now you have something that’s less than what you started with.”

Now let's get to lighting. Here is a LED luminaire. Before anyone even gets the idea, this is not a pick on LEDTronics session; just an example, and if it wasn't totally crap then I couldn't pick on it ... oh wait. Read all that gibberish and you see some great marketing. This "uses half the area of 4ft lamps" is my favorite; who cares? I've been at this lighting thing for 15 years and I don't recall picketing and strikes over the size of troffers in grid ceilings.

The "800" unit outputs 2753 lumens at 36W = 76 lpW. Not bad all-in-all; sure beats the 50 lpW a lot of these products tout as "great". However, I have to just laugh at it replacing a 2x4 troffer. Excuse me? What color is the sky in your universe? I yank open my trusty Acuity PSG (hey, if you like somebody else, you will find the same troffers with the same basic performance) and find a run-o-the-mill troffer. Let's say I want to be uber-green; I'm going for a 2-lamp with a Osram QHE ballast. i.e. "High Performance T8". There is another blog post on this subject, and please go read it; it will change how you spec troffers at minimum.

What we've got is a Lithonia 2GT8 G 2 32 MVOLT OS10ISX with a Osram FO28/835/XP/SS/ECO lamp. 82% efficiency. 2725 lumens per lamp. I get 3932 lumens total at 48W = 82 lpW. What do you think cost is on this thing? I'm not a pricing guy but the base troffer is not $50 and the options probably add maybe $10.

Do you think anyone makes a $60 LED troffer ... that is 7% less efficacy ... that likely doesn't even put out enough light to get you viable illuminance at 8x8 on center? I'll bet you the lowest price you get is at least 3X that. Who knows why.

‘Phaaa, it doesn’t taste like a hamburger.’

Hold the phone! A valid LED product?! Finally.

Okay, so the title is a bit brutal, there are LED products that are valid, and by "valid" I do mean "for real lighting jobs under normal circumstances", por ejemplo:
- If your relamping plans involve the word "scaffolding", maybe LED is a good choice.
- If your project goals involve the words "LEED" (is that a word or a phrase or ...) and/or the name of a metal like silver, gold, or platinum, maybe LED is for you.
- Cove lighting
- anything where color is involved ... and I'm not talking about cool white as a color

What I keep hoping for (think back to recent posting on the promise of LED) is a real, normal, generic luminaire with LED as the source. Well, I think we finally have one that meets my uber-nerdy criteria for a proper LED luminaire. Gotham has 4" solid state downlights that absolutely kick the snot out of anything you can do with CFL (let's assume incandescent is dead since the DOE is on a mission to rid us of this useful plague).

For years there seems to be an objection to a 6" hole in a 8-9ft ceiling. Who knows why. Who knows why once The Decider finds out they are looking at 35-40% efficiency. You'd think logic would trump "gaping holes". So what I have seen a lot of is people using CFL because it is better than incandescent for the ol' power budget, but yet it doesn't output hardly any usable light. Good gravy.

With LED, we can have a 4" hole and calm the aesthetic nerves of that chunk of the industry while not creating ulcers on the ASHRAE 90.1 committee.

(Grant me some liberty with specific Watts please; none of know what gets shipped day-to-day.)

4" 26TRT = 590 lumens and 28W = 21 lpW with a 1.0 S/MH
4" 18TRT = 530 lumens and 19W = 28 lpW with a 1.0 S/MH (notice how aperture governs output?)
Can't get any more lamp into that due to heat ... onward and upward to the 5"-ers ...

5" 32TRT = 1050 lumens and 36W = 29 lpW with a 1.2 S/MH
Well, so much for that idea ... 32W is the cap there ... of we go to the 6"-ers

6" 42TRT = 1300 lumens and 48W = 27 lpW with a 1.0 S/MH
Again, can't cram a bigger lamp into that one. Why do I keep trying ot get more light out it you ask? Hold that thought.

8" 42TRT = 1800 lumens and 48W = 38 lpW with a 1.0 S/MH (still only 57% efficient)

:: drum roll :: (and why I stopped there)

Gotham ALED 35/18 4AR LS = 1600 lumens and 38W = 42 lpW with a 1.25 S/MH

Moral of the story? You can have a 4" hole that puts out the same light as a 8" hole (and BTW that is not 2X the hole, holes are seen by apparent area and that would be related to area; it is pi*16 versus pi*64, and that is then a factor of 4!) but it is 20% less power.

I'll ignore the fact that we have 4X the luminance out of our 4" wonder. Count your blessings, I just wrote something positive about LEDs.

What a "wonderful" solution

We save all these Watts of energy with lighting, but then it seems to me we waste that effort (okay, I work from my house and live 3 blocks from the grocery store). But, how do we offset the use of fossil fuel when growing the stuff that makes the ethanol takes SO MUCH fossil fuel? Just. Flat. Stupid.

EPA to allow 15% ethanol in gasoline, up from 10% now - Drive On: A conversation about the cars and trucks we drive - USATODAY.com

Why is this on the Bagby blog? We do the same thing when we ship energy efficient products from China to Mexico for assembly and then ship them to jobs. Not all that much we can do about it, but it still makes just as little sense as covering the Earth in corn ... to satisfy probably 20% of the US demand.

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Is the technology really the better option

I will let somebody else do most of my post for me.

E-Reader Versus Book: The Eco-Math | Ecological intelligence | Daniel Goleman

In the end, the high tech gizmo that is cool turns out not to be the best option. Are there enough posts here to allow you to connect the dots on what lighting things this study brings to mind?

Wouldn't it be too fabulous if we could have a dissection of lighting products like this? Get going on that Acuity.

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LED streetlights are good ... sorta

The Lighting Research Center at RPI has released a new report through their National Lighting Product Information Program (NLPIP). If you haven't read any of the previous reports, there is some interesting stuff in there.

You can get a read-only version here. They will email you a printable file if you provide your email address here.

The abstract is below, but my synopsis of the synopsis is that you have 2X the life-cycle cost with no more than 10% power reduction over likely-installed HPS. I gave the report the ol' 3 minute read and will save the in-depth poring over for when I want to get to sleep 2 hours in advance of my body clock on my next Charlotte trip. Okay, it isn't that bad; the first sections look actually interesting in how they went about determining what to buy.

I will be freakishly optimistic and say that it is really good that we have only a 2X life-cycles cost (and no, there is no sarcasm to that); I am used ot seeing 4-6X for LED versus conventional in general (not just streetlights).

Abstract

The National Lighting Product Information Program (NLPIP) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (LRC) purchased 14 streetlights, identified by a specifier survey, between July and October 2009. Four used high pressure sodium (HPS), one used induction, eight used light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and one used pulse-start metal halide (PSMH) light sources. NLPIP determined how many of each type of streetlight were needed to illuminate 1.0 mile (1.6 kilometer [km]) of a collector roadway to meet the design criteria specified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) RP-8-00 (R2005), the American National Standard Practice for Roadway Lighting (referred to as RP-8 below). NLPIP then calculated power demand and costs per mile.

NLPIP found that:

• On average, the LED streetlights and the induction streetlight could be spaced only about one half the distance of the HPS and PSMH streetlights and still meet the RP-8 lighting criteria. If an HPS or PSMH streetlight system just meeting RP-8 is replaced with the LED or induction streetlights tested in this report on a one-for-one basis, the streetlight system will not meet RP-8.
• The life cycle cost per mile is dominated by the initial and installation cost of the poles, not the initial cost of streetlights or any potential energy or maintenance cost savings. Because of the narrower pole spacing required to meet RP-8, the life cycle cost of the LED streetlights tested for this study is up to twice that of the HPS and PSMH streetlights tested.
• On average, the LED streetlights require 1% and 10% less power per mile than the HPS streetlights tested in staggered and single-sided layouts, respectively. On average, the LED streetlights require 8% and 24% less power than the PSMH streetlight tested in single-sided and staggered layouts, respectively.
• The street-side lumens metric is a useful parameter for comparing streetlight layout costs.
• At the illuminance levels typical of collector roadways, power requirements for "white light" sources are 3% to 19% lower than HPS sources based on models of mesopic photometry.

LED Products

LED luminaires is all the industry seems to talk about ... still.

I'm all about technology; love it. I blow money on it when it is totally not necessary, but I don't kid myself that I need a $5000 road bike and related gizmos. I know it is a want; I could have the same fun on an aluminum frame. It is cool. Nothing more or less.

David DiLaura wrote a wonderful editorial for the IESNA's Leukos in January of 2007 that questioned just this:

"What is disconcerting is not the waiting - any technology must be worked on and pass through initial and difficult problem-solving phases - but rather the untoward hype, promotion, and public policy influence the the promise of LEDs has generated."

Uh, almost 4 years later, I don't see that anyone could argue with that today anymore than they could in Jan 2007.

With the never ending blather on the promise of LED, why don't I see it moving more rapidly to being a truly valid solution for general area lighting? Haitz's Law doesn't apply to the actual release of product from manufacturers in an $8BB industry? Not that there aren't products. Gotham just today released a 4" downlight with 1800 lumens; that sure beats the snot out of what you get with any 4" CFL.

Sure, sure, there are myriad specialty applications that make sense, but if this thing is truly what "they" say it is, don't we need to have more progress than we have had over the last 4 years?

On the other hand, maybe the slow progress will stem the tide of fanaticism and we can settle into the reality of a 50,000-hour T8 lamp being just as good as an LED ... at 1/6th the cost.