Green Home Lighting Design, LED, Compact Florescent

Posted May 17, 2009 06:43 by Robert

Tags: lighting, wolfers, led, compact florescent

Whole house lighting is complex and many homeowners try to handle lighting on their own only to later realize the mistakes made and value of professional help. We have been fortunate to work with Wolfers Lighting in Boston. Wolfers will also be doing the final lighting design for the downloadable house plan. The designers at Wolfers have a great grasp on the latest green lighting options including LED and compact florescent. They also have a “Greenzone” demo center where you can test and compare the latest technologies which vary widely in terms of cost and color tone. We have been working with Susan Arnold, who helped us select a mixture of LED, Compact Florescent (CF), Halogen and Low Voltage lighting with a lot of careful attention given to the Kitchen and Bathrooms. Susan laid out a plan for the electrician with the location and type of each light, switch locations and the groupings of which switches should control which lights. This plan also gave consideration to location of furniture and colors used.  In general, we used recessed lighting for walkways and ceiling and wall fixtures for bedrooms and bathrooms. In each bedroom, we also added a second light switch which controls the lower outlets in the desk and bedside areas, so that table lamps can be turned on and off when entering/exiting the room.

Many new homes tend to overuse recessed lighting because it is easier and inexpensive, however ceiling fixtures give you a lot more options to change the look of a room over time and the type of bulb. LED is clearly the future for lighting as it does not have the same delay, disposal and dimming issues of compact florescent lights. However, we wanted to avoid  expensive proprietary recessed housings because “new work” housings are nearly impossible to remove. Susan’s solution was to use a standard 5” Halo recessed housing with a new retrofit LED light kit that just became available. The LED lights come on right away, are dimmable and the color tone is very warm. Although upfront costs are about 1.5 times a regular recessed light, the LED recessed light will last over 10 years and use about 25% of the energy of a standard light, paying for itself in a few years. By using the widely installed Halo 5” housing, we are virtually guarantying that we will have many options for replacement, repair or upgrade. LED costs will continue to drop as the performance and color tone improves, so depending on your budget, you might just install the standard housing now and use a CF bulb for a few years.  Whatever you do, I would recommend using housings from one of the larger lighting players such as Juno, Halo or Lightoleer because they are all developing new LED products for easy retrofit.  

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