North Coast Electric Company

I remember when LEDs first started to gain some share of mind in the lighting industry. The 2 things that grabbed my attention were energy efficiency and lamp life. The original LED lamp-life claims were often 100,000 hrs or more. As the dust of actual testing and industry scrutiny settles, the number I hear most often now is 50,000.

One of the first LED brochures I saw had a picture of a newborn baby boy on the front and invited me to "imagine installing this light the day he was born, and not replacing the light until he graduates from college." Still one of the best marketing brochures I've ever seen at driving home the point of just how long LEDs could last in real applications. Then as I looked further into this promising new technology, another thing grabbed my attention?the price!

My e-mail inbox has a regular stream of newsletters I've opted to receive as a way to keep current on industry developments. Most of these get the "glance and go" perusal - that's the one where if I don't find anything of interest before the little Outlook envelope symbol opens, I move on. Recently, I got one from Sylvania titled "Octron life rating increase." This is scintillating stuff I thought, I gotta read on! (Energy efficient lighting obsession is a sickness...I caught it from some of the people I work with and apparently there is no cure so I can't help it... ok?) Anyway what I found was this?

Most offices are full of some kind of 4' linear fluorescent lighting. If you turn your lights on when you get to the office and turn them off when you leave (a roughly 12 hour on/off cycle), you can now get 55,000 hour rated life (that's about 12.5 years) by using- Sylvania's XP/XL series T8 fluorescent tubes and Quicktronic Pro-start ballasts!

Advantages include:

• The cost to upgrade to this system would be a small fraction of the cost of LED solutions.
• You could most likely just upgrade your current fixtures?a much greener way to go than throwing them away.
• The Sylvania warranty for this ballast and lamp combination is 5 years...that's more than most LED fixtures.
• When these lamps do finally burn out, you will have an inexpensive and readily available replacement  (note: the few LED replacement modules I've seen so far cost almost as much as the fixture they come in.)
• T8 is already the recognized best choice for energy efficient upgrades from the soon to be gone T12.

Perhaps not as sexy as the beloved LED but still pretty cool stuff! The only downside I can see to these longer life lamps is that I'm not exactly a newborn baby and if they get any longer?I may expire before they do!