Lighting rebates and incentives for LEDs

Some incentives are available for eco-friendly LED lighting.

Environmentalists and designers alike see light-emitting diodes, or LED lighting, as the future of illumination. But we’re still screwing in compact fluorescents and incandescent bulbs because LEDs are too expensive. However, there is a small but growing number of rebates and incentives for LED lighting.

What's so great about LED lightbulbs?

What’s so great about LEDs? They are more eco-friendly than the popular compact fluorescent bulb, and have few of the drawbacks. LEDs use even less energy than CFLs, and they don’t generate heat while they are on. This could mean you spend a little less to cool your house in the summer because you are not fighting the heat of all your lights. LEDs also are estimated to last 10 times longer than CFLs. LEDs also don’t contain dangerous mercury and are fully recyclable. 

Designerslike LEDs because they can be made in virtually any shape or color. They don’t have the flicker or delay of fluorescent lights (although, to be fair, this is an outdated complaint: most CFLs no longer have these problems).

Who is using LED lightbulbs?

LEDs already are ubiquitous in municipal and industrial use. Bright, low-energy LEDs are a no-brainer for stoplights and other always-on lighting applications. They are also currently trendy in under-cabinet accent lighting, and they are slowly expanding to the rest of the home as manufacturers perfect the light quality and reduce prices.

Prices continue dropping for CFLs, which average about $4 per bulb for a standard fixture. LED bulbs for standard fixtures are also getting cheaper quickly, but still cost about $40 each. However, some savings are available.

Can I get a rebate for LEDs in my area?

• Starting this month, businesses in Massachusetts and parts of New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island are eligible for substantial rebates for LED street lighting and interior fixtures.
• Commonwealth Edison in Illinois offers discounted LED fixtures.
• Austin businesses can save $300 for each kilowatt-hour of reduced usage through replaced light fixtures.
• In Canada, BC Hydro offers rebates for replacing fluorescent ballasts with LED fixtures.
• Incentives are widely available for LED Christmas lights, which are the first LEDs in many homes.

Even if you can’t take advantage of these incentives, keep an eye on LEDs. Expect prices and quality both to quickly become more attractive. A Cambridge University team last year developed a LED bulb for regular fixtures that could cost less than $3 each when the technology reaches commercial scale. Researchers also are overcoming the main aesthetic drawback of LEDs: the light is sharply focused. This is great for kitchen task lighting, but not so much for the living room, where it may be considerably darker when you are not standing directly beneath the light. 

Good return on investment: LED holiday lights

LEDs happen to be ideal for decorative things like holiday lights, because they burn bright but cool, they last for a very long time and they cost very little to run.

If you're not yet familiar with LED lighting, it's time to illuminate yourself, lest you be considered an LUD (that's short for Luddite, a 19th-century English anti-industrialist, now synonymous with anyone who's way behind the times with technology). But don't worry; all you need to know about LEDs is that they're good lightbulbs. Better than incandescent, halogen and, yes, fluorescent.

LEDs happen to be ideal for decorative things like holiday lights, because they burn bright but cool, they last for a very long time and they cost very little to run. There's just one catch: LED lights are relatively expensive to buy. So the question we're addressing this holiday season is: Are they worth it?

What's so great about LEDs?

Conventional holiday lights have become disposable goods. They're so cheap and so cheaply made that we expect to get about two seasons out of a string before cursing it and replacing it with another $3 set. And if you pay that little, you know you're getting the kind that are wired to go out entirely if just one tiny bulb has a problem. LED lighting should change all that. A good set of LED lights features "stay-on" wiring, plastic (not glass) bulbs, a three-year warrantee (see "Don't cheap out," below) and an estimated 20,000 hours of bulb life. Compare that last number to Consumer Reports' finding incandescent holiday lights that started burning out before 2,000 hours. LEDs also use 70 to 90 percent less energy to run, and therein lies your best bet for a favorable ROI (that's short for return on investment, for any financial Luddites out there).

Figuring your ROI

Chances are, you'll run your holiday lights for about a month, from sometime after Thanksgiving to sometime after New Year's. If your outdoor lights are on for an average of five hours per day, that's a total operating time of 155 hours per season. You can assume your cost of electricity is around 11 cents per kilowatt hour (a commonly used national average). Looking at two comparable strings of 100 miniature lights (produced by the same well-known company), the LED version uses about 8 watts per string; the incandescent version uses about 50 watts per string. Therefore, the LED string costs 13.6 cents for the season (8 x 155 = 1.24 kilowatt hours); the incandescent string costs 85 cents per season (50 x 155 = 7.75 kilowatt hours).

The LED lights would save you 71.4 cents per string, per season. If you have 10 strings, that's a total of $7.14 per year. Add to that savings the likelihood of LED lights lasting much longer than conventional lights and you'll see it's a good bet that LEDs will cost less in the long run. They're also guaranteed to be 70 to 90 percent better for the environment (not to mention that their longevity means less low-grade PVC plastic in the landfill).

Don't cheap out

If you decide to take the plunge this year and switch to LED holiday lights, it's a good idea to go with a reputable brand and, whenever possible, choose lights with the Energy Star label. According to the Energy Star website, decorative lights that earn the Energy Star offer a three-year warranty and are "independently tested to meet strict lifetime and electrical requirements." It's the lifetime testing you should be concerned with, because if CFL (compact fluorescent lamps) are any indication, poorly manufactured LED lights may survive only a fraction of their estimated lifespan.

How blue LEDs changed the world

LEDs have many potential uses aside from serving as light fixtures, including transmitting data over the internet and water purification.

This year's Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three Japanese scientists for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs), a technology that has touched society in innumerable ways and enabled technologies that Americans take for granted every day.
"Blue LEDs made possible the white-light LEDs you can buy in a hardware store and put in your house," said H. Frederick Dylla, executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland. "You probably have [these LEDs] in your Blu-ray player or the display for your TV or computer screen."
Without blue LEDs, the world wouldn't have backlit smartphones, TV and computer LCD screens, Blu-ray players, many forms of lighting and countless other technological marvels.
"This is a great example of a [Nobel] prize being given to a very practical application," Dylla told LiveScience.
Lighting the world
Blue LEDs, in combination with red and green LEDs (which had been discovered previously), make it possible to produce white light. This kind of lighting is much more energy-efficient and has a longer life span than conventional incandescent lights, said Christian Wetzel, a physicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
"Incandescent light bulbs lit the 20th century; the 21st century will be lit by LED lamps," representatives from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
Car lighting is another application where LEDs are making inroads. LEDs used to be used only for daytime running lights, but now, many new cars have LED headlights for nighttime use, Wetzel said.
And the reach of LED lights goes beyond developed countries. About 1.2 billion people in the world don't have access to any form of electric lighting, Wetzel said. But combine an LED with a rechargeable battery and a solar cell, and "people suddenly have lighting off the grid anywhere," he said. Sunlight charges the battery during the day, which powers the LED during the night.
In addition to generating light, LEDs can incorporate sensors that detect when people are in a room, and switch off the lights when no one is there — a requirement for any smart home.
Digital displays
In the electronics industry, LEDs provide backlighting for the liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in many smartphones, laptops and televisions. The LEDs are more energy-efficient than the fluorescent lights that are sometimes used for backlighting, and allow for very thin displays.
"We all want an ever-larger TV screen," Wetzel said. But in order to foot the power bill, large TVs must be extremely energy-efficient. LED TVs meet those requirements, he said.
Blu-ray players, the successor to DVD players, use blue LED lasers to read data off a digital optical disc. When these systems switched from using an infrared laser (like that used in DVD players) to a blue LED laser, it became possible to store five to 10 times as much data, Wetzel said.
LEDs are now being explored for their potential to transmit data from the internet across open space, similar to WiFi. Such a system could transmit a lot more data than WiFi alone, Wetzel said. This high bandwidth is possible because LEDs can turn on and off millions of times per second.
Clean and green
The uses of LEDs don't stop there. The technology is starting to be used for water purification. Currently, purification plants use mercury lamps to kill any microbes in drinking water, but these lamps consume a lot of electricity. By contrast, LED light can purify water directly at the faucet, and turn on or off as needed — resulting in huge cost savings, Wetzel said. Only a few companies are working on LED water purification right now, but in a few years, it will be everywhere, he said.
The rise of LED lighting came at a time when people were just starting to be concerned about global warming, Wetzel said. Because of LEDs' energy efficiency, using them for the world's lighting would have "an extreme impact" on society, he added.
For the invention of blue LEDs, the 2014 physics prize was awarded to Japanese scientists Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura yesterday (Oct. 7).

How an LED Uses So Much Less Energy

Energy-saving LEDS are the result of some bright and innovative ideas

With incandescent bulbs, lighting magic happens before your eyes: Electricity heats the metal filament until it becomes hot, producing light. But with LEDs, technology and sophisticated engineering are carefully packed into the lightbulb.

Inside an LED Bulb
The interior of an LED bulb reveals a digital revolution up close, according to John Banta, the engineer who oversees Consumer Reports’ lightbulb tests. Electricity passes through semiconductor material, sparking up light-emitting diodes, while a heat sink absorbs and releases the small amount of heat produced. Unlike with incandescents, most of the energy used by an LED creates light. (Ninety percent of the energy used by incandescent bulbs escapes as heat.)

While LEDs do not get hot the way incandescents bulbs do, their heat must be drawn away. Known as thermal management, it’s probably the most important factor for an LED to perform well over its lifetime, according to Energy Star. Otherwise, the light fades faster, so the bulb won’t be bright enough to use for as long as the manufacturer claims.

Shifting Shapes
LED bulbs come in various shapes as manufacturers work to improve efficiency and light distribution, help manage heat, and lower costs. Among LEDs that are bright enough to replace 60-watt incandescents, the Feit Electric LED is shaped like an incandescent and surrounded by fins that help prevent heat buildup. The Philips SlimStyle is a flat bulb that doesn’t need a heavy heat sink, so it weighs less. Both LEDs are CR Best Buys and cost $7.

One of the more unusual-looking bulbs we've tested is the Nanoleaf One. A tangle of vines cover this odd-shaped LED, along with uncovered yellow diodes that aim to provide more light. It costs $35 and was the least impressive of the 75-watt-equivalent bulbs in our Ratings.

Choose the Right Bright Light
Our Lightbulb Buying Guide will enlighten you on the different types of bulbs you can buy.

Pros and Cons of LEDs

LEDs do not burn out like other bulbs do. Instead, they fade over time, and when the light has decreased by 30 percent it’s no longer considered useful. (Manufacturers' claimed life is a prediction of when the 30 percent decrease will happen.)

LED Advantages 

• Use about 80 percent less electricity while providing the same brightness of the incandescents they replace.
• Use slightly less energy than CFLs.
• Brighten instantly.
• Lifespan not shorted by turning them on and off frequently.
• Some dim as low as incandescents do.
• Most claimed to last 20,000 to 50,000 hours when used three hours a day (about 18 to 46 years).

LED Disadvantages 

• Typically cost more than other bulbs.
• Not all A-type bulbs (the kind used in lamps and other general-lighting fixtures) are good at casting light in all directions.
• Most are good but not great at accurately displaying the colors of objects and skin tones.
• Some are bigger or heavier than other bulb types.

We've tested dozens of LEDs and CFLs. Before you spend a dime, check our lightbulb Ratings to find the brightest energy-saving bulbs. Be sure to check for utility rebates before you shop, and note that Energy Star-qualified LEDs have a warranty of three years or longer.