Lighting the future

I visited LuxLive on Wednesday to see where the lighting industry is headed. As you might expect, it can be summed up in 3 letters — LED. They were everywhere and there was very little of anything else. For someone used to writing about construction, where the pace of change is lugubrious, it's quite exciting to see an industry undergoing a rapid transformation. For most players in this space, it is a question of how to add value to a product which is both dropping in price and increasing in quality all the time. It's not enough to just sell LEDs: the future market is just too unpredictable.

And many so-called experts turned out to be almost as clueless as me. I was told on good authority that dope growers have no use for LEDs because they can't do ultra-violet light. A quick Google afterwards revealed dozens of really cheap UV LEDs. In fact, we may be about to be entering a world where growing all manner of plants at home becomes a whole lot easier and more productive.

For the past ten years or so, much of the emphasis in the lighting industry has been on increasing energy efficiency both by squeezing more performance out of the lamps themselves and by adding better control gear and better design. The arrival of cheap and very efficient LEDs has already made much of this work look pointless. Cree, the NASDAQ-quoted LED powerhouse, have now produced an LED that delivers 300 lumens per watt, which is about eight times more efficient than the best compact fluorescent, and although it's not yet in commercial production, it seems just a matter of time before the bar is raised again. In five years time, maybe 1,000 lumens per watt will be possible. By then lighting will have become so cheap to run, that it will be nearly-free. An old-fashioned 60-watt bulb could be replaced by an LED running on less than half a watt. A whole house could be lit by as little as 10 watts at a cost of maybe £5 per annum.

Not that LEDs are without their issues. The light itself is produced from a very focussed source which means there is a glare issue. Lots of work is going into shielding and diffusing this glare and making it more acceptable in every application. Backwards compatibility with existing light circuits is not always guaranteed and there are issues with dimmers not working with LEDs though, again, technology seems now to be producing LEDs that will work with existing dimmers.

One of the neatest and simplest ideas I saw was at the Megaman stand where they had adapted a dimmer so that the colour appearance of the lamp got warmer as the light level was decreased. I'm not sure this is commercially available yet, but it seemed like a very simple way of addressing the issue of the colour appearance of the lamps which exercises some people quite a lot.

The future of cabled switching also seems to be in question. Lots of stands had wireless switch plates for lighting and Megaman were also displaying a wireless home automation system which allowed you to control the heating system as well, all from your smartphone. If this is really advantageous remains to be seen — I think most people will still want a physical switch or thermostat as well, if only because smartphones get misplaced or run out of battery or break down. Wireless switching really comes into its own when you want to pre-program your lighting or heating or switch it remotely, but how many people actually want that function? We will see.

In the meantime, the wireless switchers are not being helped by a protocol turf war rumbling away in the background. Wi-fi v Bluetooth v ZigBee v Z-wave. It's all very well have Z-wave enabled kit, but how do you know the world won't have gone fully wi-fi by 2025? You could end up being Betamaxed, although, to be fair, you won't exactly run short of content, so it may not be quite so critical as all the existing protocols will be supported for decades, even if they stop being used for new applications. Nevertheless, it doesn't help matters that it isn't clear which home wireless system will prevail.

On LED Lighting

Last week, I was in my local Medlock's looking for a replacement lamp for a downlighter. The one which had gone was about five years old and was a compact fluorescent — not a comfy fit in a GU10 lamp but it worked OK until it died. I showed the dead lamp to the man behind the counter and he said they did have a replacement but that it would be both cheaper and better to switch to an LED. "They are just about the only lamps we sell now" he said. "The halogen bulb has all but disappeared and the compact fluorescent seems to be going the same way."

Then on Sunday I am at the Homebuilding & Renovating show at Olympia in London and I visit a stand called SavingCO2 which sold nothing but LED lamps. LED GU10s for downlighters, LED bulbs for where we used to put tungsten bulbs, even LED tube lights. Just about any and every bulb and fitting you have ever come across is now available in an LED version at a wattage around half of that achieved by compact fluorescents, and close on a tenth of what we have been using with tungsten and halogen, and with a light quality that most people would readily prefer.

Now admittedly, these LEDs are still a lot more than a halogen lamp — TLC is selling these for less than £2 — but the promise is that these LED lamps will last longer and, if anything, give off a better light. What is more, an interesting article online on Optics.org states that LED prices are falling by about 9% a year, but speculates that quality may suffer in the race to the bottom. There is a danger that if the quality remains too high, then manufacturers will lose the replacement market.

There is also significant money to be saved here. If a typical house has 40 lights and each light runs for an average of 800hrs/annum (about 2.5hrs per day), then the house will consume
• 2,000 kWh/annum if everything was lit with tungsten bulbs (cost £250/annum)
• 1,000 kWh/annum if it's a mix of halogen, CF and tungsten (cost £125/annum)
• 250 kWh/annum if every light fitting was replaced by an LED (cost £30/annum)

And 40 LED bulbs would currently cost around £500, so there is a reasonable payback on offer.

It's interesting to compare LEDs with PV. PV installation costs have also fallen significantly during the past few years so that, today, PV is costing around £1,500/kW to install and each kW of PV produces about 800kWh/annum in the UK climate. That 800kWh/annum is similar to the amount of energy saved per annum by converting all your lamps to LEDs, for a third of the cost.

It's also interesting to note that the building regs have been left behind by the onward march of LED lighting. Currently, the lighting requirements for Part L in England are covered in a supplement called the Domestic Buildings Services Compliance Guide: 2013 edition. It is still batting on about having to have dedicated light fittings to stop recalcitrant consumers ditching their unpopular CF lamps and reverting to tungsten bulbs at the drop of a hat. The guide requests that 75% of the light fittings in  a new build should be  energy-efficient (defined as at least 40 lumens per circuit-watt). But with LEDs achieving over 100 lumens per circuit-watt, this definition is already looking out of date.

To its credit, there is a supplementary clause in the guidance which sates that light fittings whose supplied power is less than 5 circuit-watts are excluded from the overall count of total numbers of light fittings. As most of the halogen-replacing LED GU10 lamps are rated at 3 or 4 circuit-watts, this neatly side steps the issue and allows you to put in as many as you want. My guess is that then next version of this guide will probably do away with lighting guidance altogether, as by then LED lighting will have become ubiquitous in new installations.

The big question is will LED lamps really last the 40,000 hours or so the manufacturers claim? Or will the market take them down a route towards built-in obsolescence?

Part L 2010 Lighting changes

The technical details on Part L are now with us and I am slowly getting my head around them. One of the things that stands out is that we now need to refer to supplementary documents and, in particular, to one called the Domestic Building Services Compliance Guide.

Buried away on p 123 of this document is the guidance on lighting, and lo and behold, it’s changed significantly from the guidance in Part L 2006.

What did Part L 2006 call for?
• for 1 in 4 light fittings to be low energy, or for 1 every 25m2
• for all these fittings to be dedicated fittings (no bulb switchovers later on, matey)
• 40 lumens per circuit-watt or better as the definition of low-energy. Almost all fluorescents and some LEDs will meet this.

How does Part L 2010 differ?
• it asks for 3 in every 4 outlets to be low energy
• but it relaxes the requirement for the fittings to be dedicated, meaning that people will be free to switch over to any old bulb after the building is finalled
• the new efficiency threshold is increased to 45 lumens per circuit-watt.

What it means in effect is that it will be extremely difficult to floodlight rooms with halogen downlighters, but much easier for people to ditch all the energy saving bulbs which remain hugely unpopular with consumers. In effect, all the developer has to do is to design a traditional lighting scheme with no dedicated fittings at all, and just put energy saving bulbs in everywhere. Or, for the really skin-flint developer, no bulbs at all.

Lumens per watt: a useful graph

Was looking into the background of lighting efficiency when I came across this chart on the web. Useful. BTW, Part L defines energy efficient lighting as anything that equals or betters 40 lumens per watt. Click on the chart to make it open up larger in another window.

Varilight: Handle with Care

Having written so glowingly about Varilight, I then went out and bought five. The first one that I tried to fit burst in my hand as I was pushing it into the light fitting.

Now maybe I am a big strong ham-fisted bloke (I am) who is naturally a little clumsy (I am), but this has never happened to me with a lightbulb of any description before. Maybe the Varilight isn’t quite as robust as you might hope for.

I looked at the packet, which says that the bulbs last 16,000 hours and gave a wry smile. I briefly worried about mercury contamination. Figuring life was short enough already, I then cleared up the mess and put another Varilight in its place, this time handling it a little more gingerly. Thus far, a week later, everything is working fine.

Varilight Dimmable CF Bulbs

My youngest son, Guy, is just doing his GCSEs. He’s got a geography teacher who “is always batting on” about energy saving lightbulbs, chivvying her class to get their parents to fit them everywhere. It’s the sort of topic that doesn’t really excite teenage boys, as you can imagine. They get a lot of chivvying these days. Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, don’t mug anyone: energy saving bulbs fit into that sort of category. No wonder they are all playing GTA4.

But last night I showed my sons the Varilight and lo and behold they were impressed. “Now that is cool,” said eldest, Jack. I was impressed that he was impressed. We were all impressed.

You see, the Varilight is a dimmable compact fluorescent, the first that I have seen. By flicking the switch off and on quickly, the bulb comes on full brightness and then after a second or two starts to dim. In fact it goes into a mode where it cycles between full output and around 20% output. If you leave it like this, it carries on changing output indefinitely — this is the feature that the boys found “cool.” When you get to the output you desire, you flick the switch off and on again, and the lamp comes back on at that level and will continue to do so everytime you switch it on again in future, or until you put it back into cycle mode once more. It’s all down to a quick off/on on the switch, a bit like a double click on a mouse. It’s a lightbulb for the wired generation.

What’s more, it’s a really good quality light, much warmer than your typical CF bulb, and it’s only slightly larger than a conventional bulb. I’m sold. Made by Doyle & Tratt in Horsham, Sussex, and available online for around £10, it strikes me that Varilight would make an ideal late-Noughties gift. I imagine in two or three years, dimmable CF bulbs will be two-a-penny, but right now they have cachet.

One word of caution. Varilight make a version of this lamp that is designed to work with dimmer switches, as well as having both formats available in bayonet or screw-fit. You have to read the website quite carefully so as you are sure which one you are buying. The one I have been testing is known as the YCA20S-B22 - Varilight Switch Dimmable energy saving lamp, Compact Fluorescent Lamp, with Bayonet Fitting, whereas the Dimmer Dimmable ones are known as the YCA20D-B22 - Varilight The NEW Varilight Dimmer Dimmable Energy Saving Lamp with Bayonet Fitting. Not exactly user friendly, is it? And the website isn’t the most elegantly designed beast you will ever come across either, so you may end up feeling that you are not quite sure what it is you are buying.

When will CFL's cut the mustard?

Interesting article in June’s Lighting magazine on Compact Fluorescent (CFL) lamps. In summary:

• Invented in 1981 by Philips. The original SL*18 (pictured) weighed over half a kilogram, but its 18W consumption delivered 900 lumens, on a par with a 75W incandescent, and lamp life was an unheard of 5,000 hours.

• The average EU home now contains 24 lamps, but fewer than 30% of these homes own any CFLs.

• The EU seems to be in the process of banning incandescents GLS bulbs, but it’s not yet clear when this will come into effect.

• Minaturisation: size used to be a major problem with CFLs but the development of electronic ballasts has addressed the size issue, although there are still many light fittings which won’t accept CFLs because they are too big.

• Shape: As size has been getting smaller, so we are seeing more and more conventionally lightbulb-shaped CFL bulbs coming onto the market. Megaman and Firefly Lighting (both Chinese) have got ranges of lamps very similar in shape to conventional bulbs but the prize goes to Japan’s Toshiba whose Neoball Z Real is identical in shape, size, profile and output to an ordinary 60W bulb.

• Dimming: This has been another problem for CFLs as the pulsed output of conventional dimmers can damage the electronic ballasts. You can buy specialised CFL dimmers but that is far from ideal. However technology seems to be riding towards a solution. Megaman have been producing DORS technology (DORS stands for Dim OR Switch). First switch gives you 100% output; then flick on and off a second time and the output falls to 66%, then 33% then 5%. It’s not quite dimming as we have grown to know it but it’s a fair approximation. But this June, Korean firm Feelux launches a smoothly dimmable CFL lamp into the UK, which works with conventional dimmer switches. Look out for their DimPac range.

• Speed: one of the most frequent complaints about CFLs is that they don’t reach full power for half a minute or more. Not very good for bathrooms or stairwells. However Sylvania’s MiniLynx Fast-Start is designed to address these issues: it comes on in just 0.2 seconds and reaches 80% output in ten seconds. Lamp life is not compromised. Expect more fast start lamps from other manufacturers soon.

• Colour quality: many (most?) consumers complain that CFLs emit a cold light that makes colours appear flat and dull. Whilst colour temperature is now similar to GLS lamps (2700K), the other quality of artificial light, colour render, is still proving problematic, especially on the all-important R9 Red Rendition, which incandescent bulbs excel at and CFLs don’t. But it’s quite possible that this will improve over the coming years.

• Disposal: small amounts of mercury reside in every CFL lamp. No one has ever really bothered about this before but if they are to become much more common, then some procedures are going to have to be put in place for safe disposal of CFL lamps. One to ponder.

Snaplite: energy efficient lighting

Last week, I went to visit Snaplite, a company making downlighters, based just outside Birmingham. It’s an unusual outfit, which has carved a niche for itself by concentrating on quality. Whereas the lighting market generally is awash with incredibly cheap Asian imports, Snaplite have chosen to manufacture their products in the West Midlands and to concentrate on providing well-built housings for the various lamps out there.

The business is based largely around the skills of a guy called Peter Jones (not the tall one on Dragon’s Den) who likes to tinker around with lights in his garage. He hit on the idea of manufacturing fire-rated downlighters and Snaplite became the first company to offer these into the UK market in 1998. To date, they have been pitching themselves largely at professional housebuilders but now they are becoming interested in the selfbuild sector, which is how I came to be interviewing them, having met Anthony Ottway (pictured here with Graham Stevens) at the Homebuilding & Renovating show at the NEC in March, where they had taken stand space.

If you go back a few years, to the 1980s, downlighters were regarded as sophisticated and aspirational. Back then, the ceiling-mounted spotlight was still the thing. People did use downlighters in the home but not that often. That started to change when low-voltage halogen lamps became fashionable. People saw what they did in shops and in restaurants and instantly they wanted that same effect back in the home. An industry was born.

Not that this did our overall energy consumption any favours. Whilst low-voltage halogens are around twice as energy efficient as ordinary tungsten bulbs, you need a shed load of them to flood light a room. Instead of a modest house having perhaps 20 or 25 light central pendant fittings, a fully downlighted equivalent would probably use around 60 or 70, typically four in each small room and as many as ten in the main living areas. That’s an awful lot of lights. Anyone considering planning for energy efficiency would do well to bear that in mind.

But it’s another aspect of building homes which brought Snaplite to prominence and that is the problems associated with making holes in ceilings. In the early days of downlighting, no one gave a toss. It was all regarded as part of the fun of using downlights, just a detail to be undertaken as quickly and cleanly as possible. But holes in ceilings are not good news. Although the devastating effects of fire spread through ceiling holes and socket boxes had been known for some time, the fire regs had always ignored them, preferring to concentrate on testing wall and ceiling assemblies built without penetrations. But holes for downlighters not only increase the risk of fire spread, they also let through noise and condensation, and they are a source of air leakage. Additionally, because downlighters burn hot, you need to leave space in the ceiling recess around each light. That’s a whole catalogue of construction woe.

Rather than ignore these problemos, Snaplite hit on the wheeze of designing them out. It then hit on another wheeze of highlighting these problems to the housebuilding industry: their 1998 launch of the fire-rated downlighter made much of the problems raised by competitor products.

Then came interest from the acoustic wonks. When Part E, the sound regs, were beefed up in 2003, a very similar concern surfaced: holes in ceilings were really bad news for people wanting to acoustically separate flats. A fire rated downlighter turned out to work pretty well as an acoustic downlighter as well; not surprising really, because the issue is pretty much the same. The downlighter has to be re-engineered so that the heat is directed down as opposed to being allowed to dissipate in the ceiling void, and the housing around it has to be made from pressed steel and it has to be reasonably airtight. There is, in effect, an integral fire hood. If you do all that, as Snaplite did, then your fitting is pretty much bound to be fire proof, airtight and acoustically-rated.

So Snaplite has product which is fire rated (Part B), acoustically rated (Part E), doesn’t let condensation through (Part C), and is also airtight (Part L –airtightness requirements came into effect for the first time in 2006). Also because of the design of Snaplite’s downlighters, you could lay insulation across the back of them without having a break in the insulation. Competitor products required you to leave a large 600mm gap around the downlighter because they burned so hot. In an era where insulation was at last beginning to be taken seriously, leaving a hole that big made no sense.

Of course, a Snaplite downlighter wasn’t cheap, especially when compared to stuff flooding in from China, retailing for two or three quid. But for a while no other downlighters even tried to compete in quality, and they carved out a good market with the more scrupulous builders, egged on by both local authority building control and the NHBC who were impressed by Snaplite’s approach.

But these days, the competition is catching up. Snaplite are not the only show in town and wholesalers now stock various types of fire rated and acoustic rated downlighters at prices which undercut UK-made Snaplite’s output. Snaplite point out that the industry is full of sharks and that much of the so-called fire-rated kit on the market is nothing of the sort and that, furthermore, there is really no effective way of policing this situation. Their problem is that, having done all the hard work of establishing that ceiling penetrations are a problem, and engineering a solution, their market may be taken away from them by a bunch of cheapskates.

The solution is of course to innovate still further, to stay one step ahead of the game. To this end, they are courting the selfbuild market in the hope that here is a group of specifiers who may be prepared to pay a little more for quality. With the increasing interest in energy efficiency, many selfbuilders want help in designing a low energy lighting scheme that looks good and provides good quality light. They have launched a compact fluorescent range called Emerald, which is designed for ambient lighting in halls and stairwells, and they have added a range of low energy pendants, wall lights and illuminated mirrors so that they have a more rounded range, the sort of thing which a selfbuilder might think of as a one stop shop. LEDs are beginning to feature in this range as well, although to date mostly as shelf lighting and in strips.

Snaplite have also started offering a design service aimed at selfbuilders wanting both quality and energy efficiency. If you are looking at spending over £3,000 on a lighting scheme, which they argue is not an exorbitant amount for an upmarket house, Snaplite will undertake a design for you for £100, refunding £50 of this if and when an order gets placed. It’s an interesting proposition and one I can see may be attractive to a lot of selfbuilders.