Lux Magazine is up with an interesting short read. It’s commonplace for LED manufacturers to claim 50,000 hour life for their products, but that could lead to future litigation. 

From the piece:

A Lighting Retrofit Will Save Your Business Money

Many small businesses are converting their incandescent and halogen lights to more energy efficient sources. The reasons are clear for fairly low upfront costs businesses will save money through decreased energy consumption, lower lighting replacement costs and local, state and federal rebates. For many business owners the question becomes, “Great so what do I switch to? I hear a lot about LEDs but my electrician says fluorescent is cheaper.”

The First Question You Must Ask Is “Am I Happy With my Current Lighting Scheme?”

Are you happy with the way your space is lit today? Does your space accomplish all of the marketing and atmosphere goals you have? If the honest answer is “No” then before calling a lighting distributor or contractor you should call a lighting designer.

If on the other hand you’re happy with your lighting scheme, where lights are and what they are doing. Then retrofit is the answer. Within the world of retrofit the question often arises CFL versus LED. Well take a look at the following slideshow then see my conclusions below. 

Spoiler Alert: LED is My Winner…​

Always remember the energy department’s focus is on just that - energy. That’s their job. Here are two interesting pieces in Jim’s post on LightNOW. 

The LED PAR38 lamps had luminous intensity distributions ranging from narrow (8° beam angle) to very wide (64° beam angle).

It’s critical that narrow beam lamps become available and reliable to designers. They are a critical tool. Traditionally, manufacturers have had a tough time with consistency in narrow beam ranges. 

Although there were a few exceptions (two products had a CCT above 5000 K, and three had a CRI of less than 80), most of the LED lamps had color quality attributes that were appropriate for replacing halogen PAR lamps in most applications. Some applications, such as museums, may require better color rendering, which may limit the number of available LED options.

This is a vague passage. First of all, 5000K is not the bench mark for color temperture I’d use. Rarely would I use a point source over 3500K. The other is a CRI of 80. Halogen has a rated CRI of 100. Trading down 20 points in CRI is a major sacrifice in many lighting applications.