Lighting Industry Sees Consumer Outrage Over Phase-Out of Incandescent Bulb

The phase-out of incandescent light bulbs -- which began in January 2012 with 100-watt lamps -- will be complete on New Year’s Day when 40-watt and 60-watt bulbs can no longer be brought into or manufactured in the U.S. But according to a survey commissioned by Lutron, two out of three Americans aren’t aware that the century-old light bulb they know is on the way out, and only 10 percent know about next-gen bulb options including compact fluorescents, halogens and LEDs.

The replacement bulb market offers tremendous opportunity for new entrants to the market, and it offers just as much opportunity for consumer confusion. Not only are there many more bulb options today to fill the 3.2 billion screw-base bulb sockets in U.S. homes, the new types don’t all follow the same path. That will be a game changer for Americans used to buying a four-pack of 40-watt bulbs for $1.70. Pre-2014, a light bulb was a light bulb. Post-2014, the familiar names -- GE, Philips and Westinghouse -- will still be there, but so will an array of brands consumers never heard of offering LED bulbs at competitive prices. At roughly $10 and up, consumers will have strong incentive to go with the bulb tagged at the lowest price. Halogen and CFL bulbs are also part of the 2014 landscape, as light types that consume at least 25 percent less electricity than their incandescent counterparts.

Consumers tempted to buy on the cheap could be sorely disappointed when they discover not all LED bulbs are created equal, and that will likely create headaches for lighting control companies and their dealers. LED bulbs don’t yield the same results as incandescents when controlled by a dimmer. Our own experiment with a Lutron lamp dimmer and LED bulbs from Cree and Philips yielded widely different results. The $9.99 Cree bulb dimmed only partially and not to the low level we were accustomed to with an incandescent bulb. The $14.97 Philips bulb, on the other hand, dimmed far closer to dark and replicated the warm, incandescent experience.

Lighting control company Lutron, which invented the residential lighting dimmer, has a strong interest in ensuring a smooth transition to the new age of lighting and is “leading the charge” on education, a company spokeswoman said at a recent panel discussion it hosted in New York on the phase-out. “Bulbs are all controlled a little bit differently,” she said.

Lighting industry professionals had expected the number of choices for bulb replacements to narrow when the phase-out cycle ended, but a surprise has been that the choices increased, said Terry McGowan, director-engineering and technology for the American Lighting Association, during the event. Consumers shopping for bulbs in stores today “are finding more choices than they've ever had before,” he said. The 40- and 60-watt bulbs transitioning out of the U.S. home represent 60 percent of bulbs used in residential lighting fixtures today, so while the transition began in 2012 with higher wattage bulbs, consumers will feel the phase-out come January more than they have before, McGowan said. “I think we'll see some reaction from consumers when they go to the store and their 60-cent light bulb has disappeared and something else is in its place,” he said.

Retailers will feel the wrath from consumers over pricing and bulb changes. CFLs range from $1.22-$2.75 for a 60-watt equivalent, and halogens run $0.92-$1.50, he said. But 60-watt-equivalent LED bulbs promise to elicit “sticker shock” at $10-$50 apiece, he said. It won’t be an easy decision for a homeowner to convert the household to LEDs, with the average house using 67 bulbs.

LEDs total only 1 percent of bulbs in homes today, but they're on a growth curve along with halogen lamps, while fluorescents are running flat because “they look funny and the consumer doesn’t like them,” McGowan said. The saturation rate has stayed at 25-30 percent for CFLs despite heavy promotion and incentive programs offered by utilities to reduce energy consumption. Halogens more closely resemble the light customers prefer and their penetration rate is rising. The big growth for LED “is ahead” -- next year and in 2015, he said.

Lighting control and dimmer makers are likely to experience the discontent of customers whose lights don’t work the same way they used to with incandescent lights. Dimmers control 4 percent of the lights in U.S. homes, McGowan said, with 80 percent of those in ceiling fixtures.

The story is bigger than about replacing bulbs, McGowan said. The replacement bulbs apply to existing sockets “and not to new fixtures that could be coming along,” he said. He cited one LED lamp model with two knobs: one for dimming and one to adjust the color. “The consumer now has choices he didn’t have with incandescent, and that’s to change the color of the light to suit their mood, to suit their décor or because it looks better to him,” he said. That will create a bigger market for task lighting, McGowan said, including in cabinets and under counters as well as the lighting market “for older eyes” that’s growing at a rate of 17,000 fixtures a day.

How consumers respond to the lighting options made possible by LED technology remains to be seen, McGowan said. The control opportunities have expanded and “it’s going to be an exciting two to three years in the lighting industry as the calls and emails come in,” he said. “The roller coaster has started."

Lighting designer Jason Byron Teague said during the Lutron panel discussion that his customers generally don’t like the look of fluorescent lighting at home but are more willing to accept LEDs. Halogens squeeze in under the government requirements for energy efficiency and are controllable in much the same way as incandescents, but they're not as efficient as CFLs or LEDs. “It’s likely that LEDs will become more and more attractive for consumers as long as the quality continues to improve and the retail cost continues to decline,” Teague said. But he warns customers that dimming is not as straightforward in the CFL or LED world if a dimming system hasn’t been specifically designed for new light sources. He cited Lutron’s C-L dimmer that “eliminates most of the potential compatibility problems” that a consumer is likely to get when trying to dim a CFL or LED with a traditional dimmer, including flickering and limited dimming range.

Lutron’s C-L dimmer, designed to work with all bulb types, was a hedge against the incandescent phase-out and a way to future-proof dimming for the foreseeable future. Ethan Biery, LED engineering leader for Lutron, spoke of consumers’ fondness for the incandescent bulb and its warm glow. “Every light bulb worked on every dimmer out there,” he said of incandescents. LEDs “can” provide a good quality of light, though that differs widely from light to light, he said. When consumers pair an LED bulb with a dimmer, he said, results “can be all over the map” from very good to very poor. Where an incandescent becomes “orange,” an LED typically dims down to a whiter color, he said.

The sheer number of components in an LED makes it “very complicated on the inside,” Biery said. The circuitry has to be built to dim and manufacturers “do different things with that circuitry” that in turn “makes the bulb behave differently,” he said. LED bulb makers have to make choices that an incandescent bulb maker didn’t have to make regarding light output, dimming capability size and color quality. “Better quality light costs more because it’s harder to do,” Biery said. Tradeoffs come into play as LED bulb makers reconcile features with cost. Some LED bulbs aren’t even dimmable, he said.

Today there are hundreds of lamp makers compared with fewer than five just a few years ago, Biery said. “Some you'll recognize, some you'll recognize but not from the lighting industry and some you won’t recognize at all,” he said. The newcomers don’t necessarily know what consumers want “so they may make wrong choices,” he said.

That’s a challenge for Lutron, Biery said. “How do dimmers that were designed 10, 20, 30 … 50 years ago work with an LED light bulb” that was designed 10 weeks ago, he said. “There’s not a match there,” he said. “It’s difficult to say this dimmer designed 10 years ago is going to work with a bulb that wasn’t even a thought in someone’s head at that time.”

LED bulb makers have to go through a list of considerations when designing a lamp including how well is it going to dim, how low will it go and how smooth will the dimming be, Biery said. A lamp maker can spec a lamp to dim down to 10 percent and if dimmed by a compatible dimmer, the desired result will be achieved, he said. “Control an incompatible bulb and it won’t dim well, it will flicker, it will not get to 10 percent and you have a mismatch in compatibility,” he said. For dimming to work properly in the LED age, “you need a well-designed lamp paired with the proper control to get good performance for the end user,” he said.

Homeowners never had to think about that before, so Lutron is hoping to educate them -- and preserve the integrity of light dimming -- through its Control Center of Excellence. Lutron started the knowledge base several years ago following the enactment of the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) in 2007, which mandated the changes in lighting efficiency. Included on the website is a compatibility chart where consumers can see which CFL and LED bulbs will work according to Lutron standards.

Lutron’s compatibility chart lists some 350 bulbs but there are more than that due to model number variations, Biery said. Each bulb goes through a two-day testing process, he said. Of those tested, more than 90 percent have been deemed to work “well” with Lutron C-L dimmers but only 50 percent are designated as performing “very well,” and those are recommended, he said. The performance delta is almost entirely due to differences in the lamp design, Biery said, saying those that don’t make the cut weren’t designed for dimming. “The world’s best dimmer cannot make a bulb designed by the manufacturer for mediocre dimming perform any better,” he said. Issues that affect compatibility result in performance problems including buzzing, flickering, drop-outs, sputtering dimming and delayed response and premature lamp failure, Biery said.

With so much at stake for Lutron’s dimmer business, it would seem a logical fit for the company to broker an OEM agreement for a dimmable bulb line under its own brand that it can guarantee will deliver an optimum consumer experience. But for now, Lutron doesn’t plan to toss its brand onto the bulb shelf, Biery said. “There are a lot of good bulb manufacturers out there, and while Lutron is a well-known control name, it is not necessarily a well-known bulb name,” he said. The company’s strategy instead is to help bulb manufacturers make lamps that work well with Lutron products, he said.

Control4, on the other hand, is taking a look at the possibility of a Control4 bulb in a limited capacity, Jeff Dungan, executive vice president, told us. “There’s a chance,” Dungan said, although the bulb type would have to be one that’s “not easily obtained” in the general marketplace. “We don’t want to be a broker for light bulbs, but we could see a specialty type of bulb that might be of interest,” he said, which could be under-the-counter or kick-lighting that’s not generally available at retail. Control4 has been asked by the dealer channel on occasion to consider those types of lights “so they know they can specify a piece and be confident in the implementation."

Dealers are asking for guidance on compatibility with LED bulbs in general, Dungan said, saying a search on the Web for LED bulbs can bring up “thousands of hits.” With all the choices, it’s a confusing time for dealers, “and it’s not always about price,” he said. An “Expensive one can be bad, too.” Control4 is pointing dealers to established companies in lighting as “go-to guys that we have strong interoperability with,” he said.

LEDs are changing the face of lighting and what it means to have a luminaire, Dungan noted. LED lighting is about more than replacement bulbs and extends to fixtures themselves. “Now you don’t need a ceiling can anymore,” he said. Installers can bore a hole in the ceiling without installing a fixture. The luminaire itself is integrated and is the piece of art and the LEDs “are just inlaid into that piece of art,” he said. The thing that holds the light source is the aesthetic piece and they're inseparable, he said. In those implementations there’s no light bulb to replace, and that’s enabled by the long life of an LED bulb, he said. Lights can take on shapes that weren’t possible before because of the flexibility of LED lighting, he said.

Control4’s major concerns with next-gen lighting are interoperability with its lighting control system and consumer satisfaction with color temperature, Dungan said. Energy-efficient lighting tends to present as “colder” to consumers. The yellow color of an incandescent bulb is appealing to the U.S. customer base, which he thinks has constrained the acceptance of LED lighting in the U.S. Companies including Cree and Philips are using the technology itself to control color temperature, he said. An LED bulb measured as 2700 degrees Kelvin looks far “yellower” than 5000 degrees, he said, so the idea that a consumer can control that from the light itself is an appealing solution. Dungan said some Philips LEDs are “clever” in that at regular brightness they look white, but as they are dimmed they turn on more LEDs to make them look warmer at lower light levels. Manufacturers such as Cooper Lighting address the color temperature difference with different versions of the same model of bulb, he said.

Dimmable range varies among LED bulbs, which have a narrower dimming range than incandescents, Dungan said. Control4’s recommendation to dealers is to adjust dimmers to extend the dimming range with more steps in the dimming progression between minimum on and maximum brightness to compensate for the limited range.

While Philips was one of the first to promote the LED’s ability to run the gamut of the color spectrum, Dungan believes controlling color temperature will be the primary use of color control in LEDs. “It will be less about being purple one day and pink another day, but maybe it’s about repurposing the use of a room and having the light adapt to that usage,” he said. For reading, a user might want to adjust the color of a bulb to 5000 degrees Kelvin, but for relaxing or accent lights, the light could be set to 2700 degrees Kelvin “which has more yellow in it,” he said.

Philips’ Hue lighting allows consumers to change color and be controllable by app. Control4 doesn’t have an interface to the Hue directly but partners have created a driver to allow Control4 to tie into the Hue system. Dungan expects more of those applications in the future “where lights are powered by line voltage” but the color is controlled by RF or a wired protocol. That would require an upgrade through a driver not available today or a feature that’s more native to bulbs themselves. Looking out 3-4 years when that capability is in products, Control4 will have products that can talk to those lights directly and be controllable through its user interface. “We see that that’s the future of the market,” he said.

One of the upstart companies hoping to ride the wave of the LED surge is Switch Lighting, which is leveraging its lighting technology in the commercial market with a line of 40- and 60-watt-equivalent bulbs that have hit retail in time for the government cutoff of incandescent bulbs. The company is working with utility companies who offer the Energy Star-rated bulbs at a subsidized rate that could fall as low as $3.99 compared with the retail price of $11.99, said Gary Rosenfield, executive vice president-marketing and national accounts. Switch says its LQD Cooling System delivers light that is dimmable and has a color temperature of 2700 giving it the warm look consumers want.

The challenge for lighting control companies is that their legacy systems were not designed for LEDs, Rosenfield said. Switch is working with Lutron and Leviton on compatibility, he said. Older dimmers were designed for a certain amount of electrical load, he said, and a higher load is needed for smooth dimming. Less wattage used in energy-efficient bulbs results in dimming that’s not smooth, something that consumers won’t be happy with, he said. “It’s up to the retailer and manufacturers to educate consumers the best they can,” he said.