When the ball drops at midnight in NYC’s Times Square, it will be lit with LED lights.

This year sees a brand new ball made by Waterford Crystal and Philips Lumileds lights. Here are a couple more links for more details:Times Square Alliance

Philips Lumileds case study

USA Today had this story about booming sales of LED Christmas lights.

Some highlights:

Philips claims that 10% of their Christmas light sales are now LEDs. I don’t know about you, but I never see any Philips Christmas lights in stores, either incandescent or LED.

GE Lighting is mentioned as creating the LED lights for the National Christmas Tree and the Capitol tree. I have never seen GE Christmas lights in any store, as I lamented here.

I know that I bought 3 strings of colored LED lights for my indoor tree. When I went back to the store to get more (I got a really gorgeous, big tree this year), they were sold out.

Just as Rudolph’s red nose guided Santa’s sleight that foggy night, LED lights guided my guest to our Christmas party this year!I live on a busy, narrow country road with no place for guests to park. So for our annual Christmas party, I have guests park on a nearby side street. This year, with 3 storms in Boston, the street was narrowed by piles of snow, so I only wanted guest to part on one side. So I rigged up a sawhorse with a “No Parking This Side” sign, and lit it with the Fulcrum LED Undercabinet light I reviewed here.

With 3 AAA batteries, the light ran for no problems from 5 pm to 11 pm. Guests all said they saw the sign no problem and the party went on!

Color temperature has a specific scientific meaning. If you use the term “warm glow of light” to describe a typical incandescent bulb, a color scientist will correct your naive description. Similarly, the description “warm white” for a particular type of LED that mimics incandescent light closely is a misnomer.

Wikipedia, of course, has a full discussion of color temperature and several nice diagrams. I’ll summarize here.

Some LED products provide their color temperature. Some are labeled simply “warm white” because we lay persons think of the yellowish glow of an incandescent light as “warm”, though they have a color temperature close to the relatively cool incandescent lights.

Natural daylight is around 5000 degrees, while incandescent lights are around 3800 degrees.

Oddly, reds and oranges are at the cooler end of the scale (under about 2000 degrees K) while the hottest temperatures (16,000) are blue.

Thoroughly confused now? It is probably best to divorce in your mind the concept of temperature as a measure of heat/cold from any color associations.

The idea of color temperature originated with Lord Kelvin in the 19th century and relates to “absolute zero”, the temperature at which nothing can be colder.

Because colors look different under different lights sources (which have different color temperatures), this concept is often used in photography and printing, with a 5000 degree K light source used as a standard to ensure that whoever looks at a photograph or proof is seeing it under controlled conditions.

Lord Kelvin’s scale involves heating a “black body radiator” to different temperatures and measuring the light emitted.

Product: 70 light, 24 foot strand of “Mini-ice”, Warm white lights (What does “warm white” mean?)

Brand: Unknown 

Manufacturer: Holiday Creations

Retailer: Brookstone catalogue (link to product here)

Price: $19.95

Summary

In my prior post about the LED Christmas lights I bought at my local Ace Hardware, I noted the bluish tint to the color and that my wife didn’t like it. I decided to try these out. I’m pleased (and so is my wife!). Lesson learned: Look for “warm white” LEDs.

In the picture below, the Brookstone lights are on the left, the ones I bought at Rocky’s are on the right:

Not only is the light more like what we are used to from incandescents, these are a bit brighter (of course, the Brookstone string has 20 more LEDs than the Rocky’s string) so they provide enough light to safely get down the stairs at night.

With magic of digital photographs, MS Paint and Picture Manager, I cobbled together a side-by-side of the Brookstone LED and incandescents:

Lesson learned: look for the “warm white” description when buying LEDs if you want a more “natural” light.

All Things Considered on NPR had a story today about the puppet used in the 1964 animated Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. The story interviews the puppeteer who found Rudolph and restored him. His original light bulb nose was lost long ago so the puppeteer replaced it with an LED.

Isn’t progress great!

Product: A small lighting device meant to be stuck in any small, dark spot

Manufacturer: Fulcrum Products, Inc., Portland OR (company seems not to have a web site)

Retailer: Ace Hardware

Price: $11.95

Description: A six led device that uses 3 AAA batteries. A strip of adhesive allows you to put it anywhere there is a dark corner. The leds are in a bar that swivels so you can direct the light where it is needed.

We all have those dark niches in cabinets, shelves, etc. One of ours is under our kitchen sink, though this picture doesn’t do the space justice. When you are looking for a clean sponge or other cleaning product that lives under here, it is a lot darker:

So with my LED obsession, I thought I would try out this product. It does a nice job of bringing light into this space which would otherwise be expensive and a pain to light (run electricity, find a small fixture that would fit, etc.).

I have a deep curiosity about science, took my share of chem and physics in high school. But that’s about it. When you delve deep into LED’s you quickly get beyond my meager knowledge. So here’s my translation (with apologies to any scientists who shake their heads at my oversimplification!).

Incandescent lights work by using electricty to heat a filament until it glows. The fact that so much heat is given off explains why they are relatively inefficient sources of light.

LEDs work on principles of subatomic physics — but don’t get scared off, I’m not going to go too deep into it. Electrons orbit around the nucleus of an atom at various levels, some of which have higher energy states, others have lower. When an electron “drops” from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, it gives off some of its energy in the form of a photon, which is a unit of light.

The tricks to getting LEDs to work as efficient, bright lighting devices are:

1. Making sure the photons escape. As the photon is emitted, is may get absorbed by another electron which would use the energy to “jump” up to a higher energy state.
2. Getting the right kind of light. Depending on the materials involved and the “gap” between the energy states the electrons move between, the light will be of different wavelenghts. Different wavelenghts result in different colors of light.
3. Concentrating the light. The light can go in any direction as it leaves the “diode”, so additional components in the “bulb” need to direct and focus the light into a usable beam.
4. Getting enought light out of the materials. LEDs have been used for years a indicator lights, which don’t need to emit a lot. To get enough light to read by or to light a room becomes much trickier. You can pack a whole bunch of individual LEDs into a single “bulb” but this gets expensive. Fortunately, the basic materials are semiconductors and some of the processes to make LEDs are similar to the materials used in computer chips. So just as computer speed and memory have increase dramatically as the technology has improved (Moore’s Law), similar efficiency gains have been seen and are predicted for LEDs.

If you want to dig into more of the details, Wikipedia (as usual) has an excellent entry.

Another good article is at How Stuff Works.

Who can ever forget the invention of the Itty Bitty Booklight! It was a marvel of its time and probably saved countless marriages LED technology is revolutionizing this product category, and the new shapes this type of light are taking show, in a microcosm, the potential for LED lights to change more than just energy consumption.

Just for fun, I lined up all the various booklights we have acquired over many years. This “family picture” shows an interesting evolution of this product:

On the left is the original Itty Bitty Booklight. It took a battery pack with 4 C-cells to run the one little incandescent bulb. But it was a nice product that allowed my wife to read while I went to sleep.

In the middle is a fluorescent bulb version. It only took 4 AA batteries.

The two on the right are LED bulb versions. Both take a couple of button cell batteries.

My favorite is the one on the far right, which I got at Brookstone a couple of years ago. It folds up into a tiny item, only slightly larger than a credit card. Easy to travel with, has 3 LEDs so there is plenty of light, and is totally adjustable to get the right light on the page.

The low energy requirements allow the batteries to be small. This enables new kinds of designs that are both more convenient and provide better light.

I can’t wait to see how home lighting evolves as LEDs enable new kinds of fixtures and even new types of ambient lighting that may not even require a fixture!

PS. Zelco, the maker of the Itty Bitty Booklight has LED versions of it, like this one. It takes 2 AA batteries. Interesting they specifically mention using a Nichia LED assembly, one of the companies I mentioned in this post.

I was in Home Depot yesterday and couldn’t help going by their Christmas decorations section to see what they had in the way of LED lights.

There were rows and rows of LED lights (at $7.99 a string for 50 lights – best price I have seen), but they were all some generic/store/non-name brand. Made in China, of course.

GE had the most shelf space, but all their lights were traditional incandescents. Yet, they have a made a significant strategic investment in LED with their Lumination division.

So, GE, what’s up? You appear to have the largest market share in Christmas lights. You espouse “Ecomagination” as your strategy. On the Ecomagination site, you pay Kevin Kline to narrate – and who knows what cinematographer to create — glitzy videos.

Granted, you probably make more money selling lighting systems for grocery displays to Wal-Mart, and I applaud that.

But take a hint: the LED Christmas lights on Home Depot’s site are sold out online.

If you want to been seen as a green company, do more with your products, and less with your PR.