LED Decoration Lights — a Winning Choice?

 

As president of LED Lighting Technologies, Dr. M. Nisa Khan consults in the solid state lighting industry and educates consumers about LED lighting. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering. Email her at nisa.khan@iem-asset.com

The White House first lit a Christmas tree entirely with LED lamps in 2006, and the Rockefeller Center in New York City followed suit in 2007. Decorative lighting traditions and trendsetting dates back to 1895, when President Grover Cleveland commissioned the White House’s first electricallylit Christmas tree. General Electric built more than one hundred small, carbon-filament, incandescent lamps for the tree.
In 1933, Rockefeller Center in New York City formally began its Christmas-tree lighting tradition by decorating a tall evergreen in front of the RCA Building with 700 incandescent lamps. In time, lamp prices diminished and tree — and other — decoration lights came into common use in homes and public and commercial buildings.
Interestingly, Sylvania, for a limited time in the 40s, produced fluorescent Christmas lamps, but the inexpensive, incandescent-lamped, Christmas lights prevailed.
Christmas come first to mind when thinking of home-decoration lights, but retailers are now offering Halloween, Easter, Fourth of July and other holiday-based (weddings, for example) lamp strings.
LED-lamped decoration strings, with accompanying box claims for durability and energy savings, were introduced in the late 90s, but LED-lamped Christmas lights, for understandable reasons, have not been hugely popular.
I’ve often written that LEDs are well suited for viewing applications, but they’re not so favorable for large-scale, general-illumination uses. Stringing variously colored LED lamps (the colors are directly produced by different band-gap semiconductor crystals) to decorate a Christmas tree falls into the viewing-application category, because, as in many sign applications, rugged, long-lasting, energy-efficient — and positionable — LED-based lamps produce bright, directional light.
So, more than 10 years after LEDs’ holiday-season introduction, why do many consumers hesitate to make the switch?
Despite clear advantages, LED-based, holiday decorations are still not popular for households. They typically use far fewer lights than such commercial endeavors as the Rockefeller tree, thus, energy savings are less significant. Further, most people prefer incandescent’s warm-white light with lower correlated-color temperatures (CCT) over LEDs’ cool light with higher CCTs.
Since LEDs became commercially available, the White house and Rockefeller Center waited more than five years to switch their Christmas trees from incandescent to LED lamp illumination, even though both could easily bear the higher initial cost. Their budgets allowed them to hire the best manufacturers to design the entire lighting system, which would ensure both high-quality, aesthetic features and high CRI and lamp efficacy, with warm-white LED lamps.
In 2007, Rockefeller Center officials acquired a system with 30,000 multi-colored LED Christmas-tree lamps; the wires spanned more than five miles.
The switch cut the exhibit’s energy use by 63%. The LED lamps consume 1,297-kW hours per day, and the previous incandescent system consumed 3,510 KWh per day. Such energy savings would be difficult to achieve with gas-discharge-type lamp technologies.
Warm-white LED lamps are now available for holiday decoration lights, but most commercial ones have harsh-looking, higher CCTs. Further, the warm-white ones are more expensive, which turns many people from the LED choice. Finally, when fewer lights decorate smaller trees and other structures, omnidirectionality becomes more important, which is difficult to achieve with LED lamps.
LED lighting technologies undergo constant development and improvement and their high-tech requirements restricts the crucial engineering know-how to a few major manufacturers. For now, many focus only on niche markets and choose to only offer well-binned devices.
Many decoration lamps fail to produce the high-quality, warm light that buyers prefer because numerous package-LED-lamp providers bulk-purchase manufacturer’s rejected lamps and resell them for various applications that, most likely, include decoration lights. The quality variations are quite significant and, understandably, consumers are often unable to determine the better ones by reading the product label.
And, it’s unlikely that quality LED manufacturers will diverge their product lines into such a high-volume but low-revenue business as holiday lights; nor will consumers care to pay higher prices for the occasional use of energy-efficient, long-lifespan lights.
As LED technologies advance, the products will improve, and the prices will diminish, and, in turn, such changes will make the technology available for more applications. Expectedly, quality variations in LED decoration lights will diminish, and we’ll see standardized, dependable, affordable products. Or course, general acceptance will depend on investments, technology improvements and, mainly, the projected profits to be gained from the sale of such ordinary items.
Presently, the general-application LED industry has evolved into four categories (note that each system principally illuminates flat surfaces, or is suitable for viewing applications, or both):
— High-brightness LEDs for LCD screen backlighting, directly-emissive billboards, electronic-message systems, signage and automotive lights;
— Outdoor lighting LED-based systems for streets, parking lots and garages;
— Direct and accent LED lighting for illuminating retail displays, refrigerators (home and commercial) and vending machines
— General illumination, which is seen as the industry’s high-revenue future.

Each segment comprises a large and growing industry. A question is, however, should any lighting manufacturer develop inexpensive, but effective decoration-type lights?
Manufacturers first need to commit to design and development programs that address such uses for LED lamps, rather than litter the market, as now, with fallout lamps from other applications.
Such projects are easier to undertake than the development of general-lighting systems that comprise larger, omni-directional lamps, which feature advanced color-quality, but, the actual business decisions will result from market, revenue, profit and ROI study data.
Many different types of LED-based decoration lamps are now available from such stores as Home Depot, Target and Wal-Mart. This year, Home Depot offered 20 different models of LED-lamped (EcoSmart brand) Christmas/decoration light strings. The colors comprised red, yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, warm white, blue and white. The lamps were housed in plastic casings shaped as ice cubes, icicles, globular, and in the traditional Christmas light shapes. Prices ranged from about $15 to $40 for up to 200-lamp sets.
Google, of course, also listed several thousand sources.
Typically, LED mini-lights consume about 0.08 watts per lamp as opposed to 0.48 watts consumed by incandescent counterparts, thus, the energy-savings advantage is clear, particularly for outdoor holiday decorations.
Buyers can also find solar-fed, outdoor-use decoration lamps that are similar to common LED-lamped yard and patio lights.
Since 2007, more than 22 cities — most notably, London, Glasgow, Washington, D.C., Denver and Cincinnati — have adapted LED lights for holiday displays.
Conceivably, LED-lamped, holiday-decoration lights will become the top consumer choice. However, while we might contemplate how long that might take, consider the historical incident of General Electric sponsoring community-wide, incandescent-lighting competitions during the 1920s. It took another 30 years before average households adopted the use of such lights.

Sidebar:

Holiday Lights’ Power Could Energize 500,000 Homes
The U.S. Department of Energy says holiday lights consume more than six terawatt-hours per year, which is the equivalent of the total electricity consumption of 500,000 homes for one month. If the average electric bill is $150, such holiday lighting could add approximately $75 million to energy company revenues.
According to factsanddetails.com, the U.S. imports more than $200 million in China-made Christmas tree lights. This amount doesn’t include artificial trees, ornaments or toys.

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