Signs of the Times - February 2012 - (Page 32)

LED UPDATE By Dr. M. Nisa Khan As president of LED Lighting Technologies, Dr. Nisa Khan educates the lighting industry and 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 LED Decoration Lights – a Winning Choice? LED holiday lights adopted by White House, Rockefeller Center and more than 22 cities TheentirelyHouse first litlamps in White a Christmas tree with LED 2006, and the Rockefeller Center in New York City followed suit in 2007. Decorative lighting traditions and trendsetting date back to 1895, when President Grover Cleveland commissioned the White House’s first electrically lit 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 comes 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, The 2011, 74-ft.-high, 46-ft.-wide Rockefeller Christmas Tree is approximately 75 years old. Aside from its netting of 30,000 LED lamps, the treetop features a 12-ray Swarovski crystal star that comprises 25,000 crystals lit with 720 LED lamps. Custom software and electronic systems program the dazzling star’s light sequencing. Hundreds of GE Energy solar panels, placed atop a nearby building, power the lamps. 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, LEDbased, holiday decorations are still not popular for households. They typically use far fewer lights than such commercial endeavors as the 32 SIGNS OF THE TIMES / FEBRUARY 2012 / www.signweb.com http://www.signweb.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signs of the Times - February 2012

Signs of the Times - February 2012
Contents
ST Update
Technology Update
Software Update
Vinyl Apps
Strictly Electric
LED Update
Technology Review
Sign Museum News
New Products
Palisades Center Mall’s Retrofit
Sign Structure Safety
Picture Them Rolling
Sign the Vote
Taxing Times
The Value of Signs
See Ya Real Soon!
Industry News
Advertising Index
Editorially Speaking

Signs of the Times - February 2012