LED technology revolutionizes world of lighting

Gary Loyd, owner of the Light House Gallery, says many lighting trends have come and gone in the 50-plus years his business has been in operation.But none, perhaps, have been so great as in the past year when many improvements were made in the realm of light-emitting diode bulbs."LED obviously is the new buzzword, and there's a lot of new technology and new products coming out to conserve energy and long lamp life," Loyd says. "It's changed more in the last year than it has in forever. Of course, energy conservation is pushing that, and it's a good thing. Once you get past the upfront cost of LED, you reduce the usage by about 85 percent, you reduce heat and you increase lamp life."While LED lights have been around since the 1960s, it's only been recently that LED lighting has been able to produce the color spectrum present in incandescent lights.
"Prior to a year ago, the colors were all over the place. Now, they've got consistency. They've got the bugs worked out," Loyd says."Red, blue and green were easy. But to come up with a true white color, it took them years to get it perfected," he says.And while the price for replacing an incandescent bulb with an LED bulb is greater, the life expectancy more than compensates.An incandescent bulb typically lasts about 1,000 hours. "An LED will last a minimum of 30,000 hours, so you're going from 1,000 to 30,000," he says."Put an LED in and you don't have to change a bulb for an average life span of 17 to 19 years," he says, adding that makes them ideal for replacing bulbs in hard-to-reach lighting fixtures. "You don't want to fall off a ladder," Loyd says.
Loyd says his customers are primarily reaching for LEDs for under-counter task lighting.Solar cell efficiency receives a transparent boost.But LED lamps are available in the full spectrum of lighting products, from recessed lighting to decorative chandeliers.In other trends, Loyd says he's also seeing more people rethinking their lighting as they choose to remodel rather than build or move."Because of the interest rates and people not being able to sell their homes for what they'd like, a lot of people … are adding a little bit more and remodeling," Loyd says, noting kitchens and bathrooms appear to be at the top of everyone's remodeling list."Especially in a bathroom, you need actually two light sources, one from the top that would be recessed, and you need a wall-mounted fixture over a vanity or mirror so there are no shadows on eyes, noses and everything," he says.To get the right combination of lighting — be it LED or incandescent — Loyd recommends taking your blueprints with you when you visit a showroom."We try to come up with a certain wattage per square foot and if it's a highly used multi-task area, we try to do more task lighting," Loyd says.