Market Cultivation, The First step to LED home lighting populirization

At present, LED light source account for only a minimum market share in a real home as primary lighting source. At the same time, few enterprises have been pursuing the marketing in these areas. As LED is still fairly new and not perfect from technology point of view, coupled with huge initial cost, product line shortage, companies invested in this area are doomed to spend more efforts.

After visiting the market and evaluating the situation, I found that some major companies have already embarked on LED home lighting R&D and market development. Most of them are optimistic in the market prospect of LED home lighting application. “Now everyone have the opportunity to enter the field, but perhaps only after 5 years, there will be no chance at all.” This is the universal mindset from the LED lighting companies at present.

Depressive domestic market

LED Lighting land-rushed on home lighting area in the year of 2008, but because of high prices and market acceptance, there are few enterprises that are specializing in the field and few options for customers. Most enterprises just demonstrated them in large-scale exhibition instead of mass production and target-oriented marketing. Based on the advantages of LED Lights, domestic enterprises has been increasing in their research and development efforts.”Right now, home lighting companies usually invest in LED R&D for future technical reserve.” Said Liu Yun, a General Manager of Tiansili Lighting Co., Ltd. So at present the vast majority of companies will not push it as the mainstream product.

Liu also noted that LED home lighting shares only a proportion of less than 5%. “So from this point, LED home lighting is still considered as high-end, while from the market point, it belongs to the low-end. Currently, we are not devote major efforts to promote LED lighting in house or residential marketing, we do it for technique storage.”

Lee Hao-Yuan, a marketing manager also pointed out that LED home lighting products still need time to be more attractive and competitive.” At present, everyone knows how prospective LED home lights will be. So many traditional lighting enterprises are using the LED source, but will not regard it as the main light source for the incredible market future.

Guo Jie Wen-chuan, director of domestic sales from Guozhi LED Lighting have different views on LED home lighting in domestic market. He believes that: With the increase of consuming capacity, there are great potential demands in China, local consumers would be more and more acknowledged with the expansion of marketing and reduction of cost. WEN Guo-Jie forecasts, LED home lighting lighting is a trend in the next 5-10 years which may become the mainstream of home lighting products.

Increasing trend of foreign sales

Compared to the depression of domestic market, foreign market acceptance of LED home lighting is totally different. Dazhi Yi said that during the last 3 years, LED Light is gradually used in household lighting, but mostly as secondary source. At present, most of the LED home lighting products are exported to overseas market. Now there are a great deal of house and residential lamps and lanterns which are applying LED as main light source. And moreover, warm white LED are the favorite option of occidental customers. “I believe the next three years, there will be great change in the LED Lighting market. Customers from Europe and the United States would gradually accept it as the main household lighting source.”

Market cultivation, the hard and long way to go

Current LED home lighting is still in the early stage of growth, although there is great potential to develop, but it still needs a lengthy period of time and requires a relatively mature market environment.

“I think that LED home lighting promotion in China is tightly related to the national policies. Same as the experience of energy-saving lamps, with the wide promotion from government, consumers will generally accept for the seek of their own benefit. Although the initial price is not attractive, from a long-term point of view, it does save money, but consumers are generally consider their short-term interests.” Said Liu Yun, Tiansili Lighting.
“I think that LED home lighting development and national policies have a certain relationship can be developed fast and slow, and the Government also has a lot to like, like the government to push energy-saving lamps. Consumers will, generally, self-interest stand point, from the interests of visible thinking. LED home lighting as the main lighting in the market more difficult, it is difficult in the consumer price acceptance. From a long-term point of view, it does save money, but consumers are generally short-term interests to consider “, TNV days Lishi Lighting Business Unit General Manager Liu that the current LED home lighting market development at an early stage of cultivation.
The other important history from energy saving-lamps, although the current LED home lighting is expensive for consumers, but with well-developed LED technology, and with the competition of more and more companies entering this field, its price will fall sharply, just as the development of energy-saving lamps. energy-saving lamps first appeared in the market at the price of 10~20 dollars, and now the prices are much lower, the public would generally accept it. “

LED lights shine at saving energy in tech gear

The same innovation that makes laptop screens thinner turns out to be one of the best energy-saving technologies on Earth – and it’s all thanks to new tricks that make it possible to create more illumination using the most humble member of the semiconductor family, the light-emitting diode, or LED.

Semiconductors, you will recall, are materials that can be coaxed into either conducting or not conducting electricity. Computer chips, which turn on and off, or count to zero and one, are the most common type of semiconductor. Solar cells, which emit electrons when struck by the photons in light beams, are another well-known semiconductor.

The LED is a solar cell in reverse, said Steven DenBaars, a professor of materials science at UC Santa Barbara. “When we put in electricity, it comes out as light,” he said.

Although the LED has been in commercial use since the late ’60s, it has ever been the blinking idiot of the semiconductor world. Costly to make and emitting only tiny amounts of light, the LED was at first useful only in expensive instruments such as calculators, watches and eventually those old VCRs that used to flash 12:00.

But in a world that is warming globally, this all-but-forgotten semiconductor may finally get its day in the sun, according to technology analyst Sweta Dash, who noted the growing importance of LEDs in a recent report for market research firm iSuppli Corp.

Writing about the display screens on electronic devices from wall-size to wrist-size televisions, Dash noted that one of the most important trends is a switch in the type of backlight that helps brighten the screens and increase the color range. Increasingly, Dash wrote, laptop and PDA makers are opting to use LEDs as backlights. Why? LEDs are thinner and use less energy than the fluorescent tubes inside today’s flat-panel screens, she said.

As Dash explained, behind the flat-panel display in a typical laptop there sits a thin fluorescent lightbulb that illuminates the back of the screen. Dash’s report noted how designers increasingly are using LEDs in this backlight function.

“In notebooks, everyone is trying to get more battery life,” said Dash, adding that the solid state LED also takes up less space than today’s fluorescent backlight. And that allows for sleeker products like Apple’s MacBook Air, which is about three-quarters of an inch thick at the hinge.

Thanks to this happy confluence of low-power consumption and thinness, Dash predicted that “in the next few years we will see this major change where these LED backlights are going to be everywhere.”

John Peddie, whose Tiburon consulting firm has tracked graphics and multimedia for three decades, said LED backlighting will not only yield thinner electronic devices but a more vibrant palette of colors on display screens. Current display technology can represent a palette of about 24 million colors. “We need close to a billion colors, our eyes are that sensitive,” said Peddie, adding that LED backlighting will enrich visual display.

But snazzier graphics and thinner gizmos are just the beginning of the LED revolution. The same power-saving characteristic that drives computer design is already making LEDs economical as a source of illumination in real world applications like traffic lights, according to DenBaars, the UCSB professor who works at that school’s Solid State Lighting and Energy Center.

“Cities are saving hundreds of dollars per intersection per year with LED traffic lights,” said DenBaars, who broke down the savings as follows.

The 100-watt incandescent bulb in a streetlight might cost $2 to buy, $40 to install and $73 a year to run, plus the cost of electricity. The bulb will likely last just six months, he said, pushing the cost to about $160 per year – two bulbs, two installations and the electric bill.

A 15-watt LED stoplight could throw off the same illumination at an annual electricity cost of about $11 – more than enough to offset the $50 cost of the solid state lamp, which should last five years, he said.

Because of the favorable economics, cities have led the charge on using LEDs in traffic lights and other round-the-clock situations in which the initial cost of the solid state device is still quite high relative to other light sources such as compact fluorescent bulbs. But it will be a while before consumers can justify the higher costs of LEDs as energy-saving replacements for older household fixtures.

“A room light is on about four to six hours a day,” DenBaars said, and that works out to a payback period on the order of three to six years.

So while LEDs may be ready to make computers smaller and sleeker, the technology will have to come down in price before it can find wider household application. But DenBaars said LEDs will eventually have a big role to play in reducing electricity consumption. And in the short term it may even find applications where its benefits outweigh its installation costs, such as in outdoor lighting for decks and patios.

“LED lights don’t attract bugs,” DenBaars said. “They don’t emit ultraviolet light like incandescent and fluorescent lights. And it’s the ultraviolet light that attracts the bugs.”

(Source: San Francisco Chronicle – May 5th 2008) 

LED lights shine at Christmas for cost reduction in Ottawa

The NCC received $160,000 worth of LED lights as part of a sponsorship program with Home Hardware in 2006-07.

What would Ottawa be like without Christmas lights adorning the capital’s tourist attractions? The answer: $174,002 richer.

According to documents obtained through Access to Information, the National Capital Commission (NCC) spends $139,604 installing Christmas lights across the capital each year.

Once the lights are up in the trees and strung across buildings, they will cost the Canadian taxpayer an additional $34,398 in electricity to run for the Christmas season.

“We do view the Christmas light program as a unifying factor for the country,” said NCC spokesperson Jean Wolff. “We organize our lights in concert with provincial capitals as a Canada-wide cultural event.”

Wolff explained that the 200,000 or so lights that adorn the capital are led lights, which require much less electricity than standard light bulbs. Last year was the first season in which all the lights on display were Led.

Despite the huge energy costs associated with running large-scale Christmas light displays in capitals across the country, environmentalists say the NCC is doing the right thing by reducing the amount of energy it sucks from the grid each winter.

“I think people should look to make and find energy savings wherever they can. We would never advocate to cancel Christmas,” said Dale Marshall, spokesperson for the David Suzuki Foundation. “There are lots of ways people can still enjoy Christmas and produce less pollution and this is one way.’

Source lfpress.ca

LED light bulbs becoming easier to find

Someday soon, Led-based lights will overtake compact fluorescents as the green bulbs of choice. While we’re not at that point yet, there are some new Lighting options trickling into home stores, like new flood lamps from GE.

The GE Energy Smart LED lamps come in two new sizes: PAR20 and PAR30 (both are 3.75 inches in diameter). GE says the bulbs deliver a “crisp, halogen-like color” but the 10-watt bulb (R30) offers an 80 percent energy savings compared to a 45-watt incandescent or 40-watt halogen light. This translates to about $15 a year in energy costs savings, according to GE.

Of course the savings do not come without trade-offs. The LED produces 340 lumens (a unit that determines the amount of light emitted), while the incandescent produces 485 lumens and the halogen has 630 lumens. So the amount of light produced is about half of what you typically would get from a halogen. However, GE points out, the conventional lights’ measures include “wasted extraneous light,” while the LED is “concentrated.” Which is to say, you may notice less light overall, but if you want a targeted light this is a great solution.

The other benefit to LEDs over traditional lights is the life of the bulb itself. The R30 bulb is rated for 20,000 hours, which GE says is as much as 10 times longer than standard lights. The longevity of the product is reflected in the price, which ranges from $35 to just over $60 for the R20 and R30 lights. Smaller “deco” led lights also are available. Find them online at Acehardwareoutlet.com or Amazon.com.