Lighting designer Randall Whitehead's San Francisco living room is illuminated by LEDs and a fluorescent lamp in the hanging fixture. Credit: Dennis Anderson

By Jeannie Matteucci

When lighting designer Randall Whitehead of San Francisco set out to remodel a two-bedroom home on Potrero Hill, he knew he wanted to upgrade the lighting and make it more energy efficient. But while Whitehead wanted to be green, he had no plans to sacrifice the style and look of his home.

“I have made it my personal mission to find energy-efficient lighting that can be attractive – and dare I say it – sexy,” he says.

“All the lighting in my home has been changed to energy-efficient lighting. OK, to be totally truthful, the fridge and the oven still have incandescent lamps. I haven’t yet found a viable alternative for those two locations. I could buy a new refrigerator with LED lighting but that just isn’t in the budget at the moment.” Read More (via SF Gate)

If you’re remodeling or building a home, you know that California has some of the toughest energy codes in the nation, and getting tougher every couple of years.  From a lighting perspective that means that lighting must be highly energy efficient.

Luckily, we have a tiny new player in the world of lighting: Solid State Lighting (SSL) better known as LED lighting. SSL has taken the lighting industry by storm and will soon knock out inefficient contenders such as incandescent, halogen and many fluorescent lamps by providing warm, dimmable, long lasting energy efficient light.

SSL is the best lighting innovation to come along since the Edison lamp, in fact, there is nothing on the horizon that can compete with this light source for the next 20 years, and SSL is projected to get better and better in 6 month cycles.

Why? Because SSL produce light via an extremely energy efficient  process called electroluminescence thereby eliminating the need to heat a filament in a gas filled vacuum tube like incandescents, or exciting gases in an arc chamber as in florescent lighting, both of which are inefficient ways to produce light.  

Instead, SSL only have to move electrons over a tiny distance to produce light. The LED chip itself is extremely small and requires very little energy to produce huge amounts of light.  Currently, a 1 watt LED is only about 1/8” square and can produce over 150 lumens per watt (LPW) of usable light.  By contrast, a 100W incandescent lamp only produces approximately 17 LPW, and fluorescents generate between 50-100 LPW – energy efficient, but still not as efficient as SSL.

This light source which until recently was considered too blue and too expensive for residential applications, now easily produces excellent color temperatures rivaling the purest white light from halogen lamps, outclasses any fluorescent light source, and is falling closer and closer to an acceptable price point.

When considering the cost of SSL, one must accept a paradigm shift in how you calculate lighting costs and its associated value. Historically, lighting cost was determined purely by the cost of the fixtures, and lamps were considered a disposable commodity.  With SSL lighting there are more criteria to consider: fixture cost, energy consumption, lamp efficacy, demand on cooling systems and lamp life. These parameters were given only marginal considerations by homeowners in the past, but going forward they will be given a bigger consideration especially since lighting is one of the highest energy consumers in the home.

SSL is not a disposal commodity; you can expect to use a typical SSL source for over 15 years. That’s longer than most people keep a car, or most appliances, so this product should be given the same consideration that one gives to choosing big ticket items such as flooring, appliances and surfaces.

From a green perspective, SSL are considered very environmentally friendly; in fact, they are environmentally friendly from production, through usable life, to disposal. 

http://greenarchitecturenotes.com/

Alfredo Zaparolli has over twenty five years experience in high-end residential construction, design and engineering. Alfredo established Techlinea Inc. in 1985 to provide quality lighting design services to discerning clients throughout the US and abroad. Prior to the founding of Techlinea, Alfredo was principal and partner of Electric Connection Inc., and was responsible for designing and installing electrical and lighting systems for many notable residences throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. He combines a deep understanding of lighting technology and design with a unique blend of creative vision, hands-on technical expertise, and collaborative style to make Techlinea sought out for projects worldwide.