Fledgling LED Lighting Comparable With Early Digital Cameras, Cree Says

Electronic components supplier Cree has broken what it calls the “magic $10 retail price point” with an LED bulb that began shipping through www.homedepot.com last week and is due in all of Home Depot’s 1,976 stores by March 21. Cree is launching three versions -- a 6-watt “warm white” bulb ($9.97), that replaces 40-watt incandescent bulbs, a 9.5-watt warm white bulb ($12.97) to replace 60-watt incandescents and a daylight 9-watt bulb ($13.97) with the output of a 60-watt incandescent, the company said.

Several factors have limited the appeal of residential energy-efficient lighting in the U.S. to date, including high prices for LED bulbs, typically in the $30-$60 range, and the unappealing light output and negative environmental impact of mercury-infused compact fluorescent (CFL) types, Mike Watson, vice president-corporate marketing for Cree, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The biggest obstacle Cree faces in winning consumers over to the new bulb type is “that failure called the CFL,” he said. Consumers believe energy-efficient lighting means CFL bulbs that “don’t look like or light like” the bulbs they're accustomed to, Watson said. CFLs tend to turn on slowly, take a while to warm up and don’t work well with dimmers, he said. Although CFLs do deliver on lower energy usage, they “failed” mainly because “they didn’t deliver the light people liked,” Watson said.

LEDs, which followed CFLs to market, don’t contain mercury and tend to deliver a warmer light, Watson said, but the unconventional industrial design of many bulbs put people off because it didn’t resemble what they were accustomed to, Watson said. Cree bulbs create the same radiation pattern and “look and feel” of an incandescent, he said. Cree is calling its LED design the first that can deliver a “no-compromise experience,” Watson said. “It really does look like a light bulb,” he said, and the company went to lengths to design its bulbs using the same glass dome as a conventional bulb, he said. If consumers aren’t put off by the look of a new type of replacement bulb, they're more likely to try one, especially at the $10 level, Watson said.

Once consumers buy in, they'll understand the benefits of LED lighting including 84 percent better efficiency, a lifespan of 25,000 hours (25 times that of an incandescent bulb), and a 10-year guarantee under a limited warranty, Watson said. Five LED bulbs in a typical home could result in $60-a-year savings on the energy bill, according to Cree data. Watson said a Cree bulb can pay for itself in energy savings within a year.

Despite the claims of a “no-compromise” experience, we found an incompatibility between the single Cree bulb sent for an audition and a wireless RadioRA lighting control system from Lutron that was designed for the incandescent world. We removed two incandescent bulbs in a track light and put in the single 9.5-watt (60-watt-equivalent) Cree bulb. The light was pleasant, not harsh as a CFL would likely be, but the bulb didn’t dim smoothly, we found. And when we tried to turn off the light -- either from a central keypad in another room and from the light’s wall dimmer switch -- the bulb wouldn’t power off completely.

We compared that scenario with another track in the apartment that houses four Philips LED bulbs. In that room, lights do power off using the Lutron system, but lights begin to flicker at dimming levels below 50 percent, we found.

We contacted Lutron to find out what issues can occur when trying to combine 2013-era solid-state LED light bulbs with an analog wireless lighting control system such as the RadioRA, which was engineered some 15 years ago. Ethan Biery, senior LED engineer at Lutron, has been testing hundreds of bulbs with Lutron dimmer systems since they started coming out, he told us, but although Lutron has worked closely with Cree, Biery has not tested the consumer bulb that launched last week. A challenge for bulb manufacturers is that “there are so many different dimmers out there,” Biery said.

Biery told us the dimmers in our analog dimming system “are expecting an incandescent load.” The dimmer “thinks there’s a big fat resistor so it treats it how it needs to to make itself work,” he said. Dimmers today -- including Lutron’s C-L series -- operate in a “more sophisticated way” so that LED loads may work better even with smaller loads presented by low-energy bulbs, Biery said.

Traditional dimmers generally have a minimum load requirement of 40 watts, Biery said. In our test, our track went from 120 watts of current down to about 10 watts with the Cree bulb, at the same time the dimmer was “still looking for 40 watts,” he said. A RadioRA dimmer needs to work even when a light is off because it’s waiting for radio signals that tell it to turn on and off and to what dimmed level, so a small amount of current runs through at all times, Biery said. In the incandescent days, that amount of power wasn’t enough to make a lamp glow hot, he said, but now that LEDs operate on such lower power, in some cases, the minimal power needs of the dimmer are enough to make the LED glow a little bit, Biery said. Even though the dimmer is off, it provides a little bit of current to flow to make itself run, “and that little bit of current is enough to make a single LED light,” he said. But there wasn’t enough current to turn off the light, he said.

There’s a difference between analog and solid-state technologies, which accounts for how different LEDs operate, Cree’s Watson said. Old dimmers were potentiometers that changed the current going into the bulb, he said, “a simple design.” Solid-state bulbs “don’t get brighter or dimmer in the same way an incandescent filament does,” he said. “There has to be electronic adaptation for the dimming curve,” he said. LEDs can “dim better” if they're using a more advanced type of dimming technology, he said. “We realize as an industry that we have to adapt to what exists out there because we can’t ask consumers to change their dimmers,” Watson said. “We don’t want them to bear that cost,” he said, so adaptations for dimming will be done in the electronics, he said. He added that Cree bulbs “work with most dimmers, “or more than our competitors."

According to Biery of Lutron, the lighting industry is trying to improve interoperability among lighting control devices and LED lamps. Standards work is under way through the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, he said. Biery, who is helping to write the proposed standard, says it is in its “final review stages” and is expected to be complete by Lightfair International to be held in Philadelphia April 23-25. Adopting that standard will prevent the kind of issue we encountered with future lamps and dimmers, Biery said.

Cree’s initial strategy is to populate the LED bulb market, a total available market of more than 5 billion replaceable bulbs, Watson said. “We need to get the consumer invested in this change even though the consumer market is 20 percent of the overall LED market, he said, and then the commercial market will follow. “The first path is to get adoption,” he said, comparing the education process to that of the camera market moving from film to digital. “When the first sub-VGA cameras came out, no one thought the end result would be there would be no more film cameras,” he said. “Now, pictures are stored in the cloud and almost every picture is taken with a phone.” The early days of residential LED lighting is about “building an ecosystem around LED adoption,” he said.

As for Cree’s intentions beyond replacing the incandescent market with bulbs that last 25 times longer than the ones they're replacing, once consumers are comfortable with the concept of LED lights “there’s a whole range of things coming with solid-state lighting that we're excited about,” he said.

Watson described “cute science experiments” going on today with control of lights through dimming, including individually dimmable lights that can be addressed independently versus controlled in groups as with conventional lighting systems. “You can individually address the LED on a bulb” and create color scenes, he noted. Watson cited companies that are mapping the sunrise and sunset light patterns of “great places on Earth” including Mt. Fuji in Japan or a spot on the Great Wall of China. “Think about the ability of having your home feel like you're on K2 in Nepal,” he said. “You can mimic the light pattern or sunrise or sunset of any spot on Earth,” he said. “There’s a lot of fun stuff to do, but the first thing you need to do is get adoption, on terms that people understand and use today.”