In today's market plain old incandescent lights just don't cut it. Even Christmas lights have gone "green" with LED's from Phillips, GE and several other brands available just about anywhere.
For the last 9 months we have been testing lighting systems and solutions. The temptation of LED lights look great. At anywhere from one watt to 6 watts per bulb, you
Crestron Dealers in the UK to think about just leaving the lights on all the time. In fact for the back entry to my house I do.
When the process began, we started by outfitting a 3500 square foot house with a combination of lighting controls to save energy and evaluate the controls. The controls will be saved for another article. Here I just wanted to focus on lights.
We started off using n:Vision CFL. CFL stands for compact fluorescent lights. Every light in the house was replaced to start the test. The color wasn't acceptable for the kitchen so GE halogens were put in place. As we added dimmer circuits from Lutron, Leviton and Crestron. Each dimmer works a little differently and we learned some tricks.
In order to dim the lights, some CFL bulbs needed to first come up to full power then reset to the dimmed power. We could do that with the macro's in the Crestron code. Lutron and Leviton required that you manually select full on, then dim to your selected level. Lots of testing and we learned some other interesting things about CFL's and dimmers. Most dimmers, specifically the electronic controlled dimmer need a load in order to operate properly. If there were one, two or three CFL the dimmer would go nuts at anything over 90%. There just wasn't enough load for the switch.
The first trick then was to make sure all scenes in the program started at 50% and went no higher than 85%. For the areas with four or five CFL's we could go from 20% to 95% just fine. With more than five the dimmers worked normal. Clearly the dimmers need a load to work properly, and two 13W CFL's aren't enough.
One thing to keep in mind at this point is all the bulbs tested were non-dimming. The next bulbs tested were from Costo. The shape and color was better for outdoor lights, not as good for indoor. The operational quirks were the same.
When Phillips released their dimmable CFL they became the next test target. Nothing different than non-dimmables was observed except the longevity. They quit after just 60 to 90 days.
By the time the Phillips test was complete, LED PAR style lights had come out of the stratosphere price range so they were added to the testing. At first the color took a little getting used to and about the time we did, the lights started to fail. They failed completely. In fact Lights of America sent out a great letter offering full refunds because the lights we not making the longevity advertised. The second batch sent to us failed more like street lights. Eight or Ten of the little LED's would fail at a time until the lights were totally gone. As you drive around look at traffic signals and note how "blotchy" they look. That is the effect we saw.