North Coast Electric Company

In case you haven't noticed...what was a rising tide of LED's being brought to market is quickly becoming a Tsunami!

Sometimes it seems as if the only thing standing between us and world peace is that we're not selling enough LED's!

Like any new technology, especially one with so much demand, there are risks as well as rewards.

LED's present us with a head spinning array of terms and criteria, some familiar and some not,  including CRI, CCT, efficacy, binning, rated life, diode, photopic, scotopic, lumens, watts, and on and on.

One of the ways to make an LED look really good is to "overdrive" it. A technique that can work in getting the order but can adversely effect the long term performance of the product.

So how can we sort through all this and tell the good from the bad if there's no obvious ugly and pretty might come back to bite us?

Don't worry...the government is going to help! ;-)

The Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency have been wrangling over who will do what with LEDS for quite a while now. It seems they have finally agreed to some sort of division of responsibility and are moving forward to help us evaluate LEDS and find the ones that will perform as they are supposed to. To that end the DOE has created a Lighting Facts Label program for LED fixtures and lamps. It is similar to the nutrition label found on packaged food. Participating Manufacturers have voluntarily agreed to use the label to disclose performance results in five areas — lumens, efficacy, watts, correlated color temperature (CCT) and color rendering index (CRI).

You can find a list of products with the lighting facts label on their web site here... Lighting Facts Product List.

North Coast has become a distributor partner with the lighting facts label program and will be using this information as part of our evaluation of what LED products to recommend to our customers. There is a wealth of good information on the Lighting Facts web site and I encourage you to invest some time exploring there.

I would welcome your feedback on how we can help you with selecting LED products.

Tom Woltjer, Energy Solutions Manager

twoltjer@ncelec.com