Greg Thorson is our Home and Living expert on light, and most importantly, LED lighting.

Q.: Greg, thanks for stopping by at this busy time, will you tell Home and Living Readers a little about your background?

A.: I started my career as an electrical engineer in a semiconductor plant and got involved in lighting when I started this company with my wife, Anne, in 2006. LED lighting is still relatively new, so most of the leaders in the industry either came from traditional lighting or semiconductors. I think it’s probably easier to get into LED lighting from the semiconductor side, but I did have to go to school on lighting design because that’s the background of most of our pro customers.

I went to college at Brown University, and have a MS in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from Stanford. I’ve run a number of distribution, manufacturing, contracting and internet companies in my career in industries as diverse as packaging, DVD replication, hazardous materials abatement, batteries and ink and toner. LED lighting is the best industry I’ve ever been a part of because the technology improves so rapidly and growth in demand is much higher than just about any other industry I can think of. The rising tide lifts all boats.

Q.: What are the different types of light?

A.: Incandescent, which includes halogen, fluorescent, and Light Emitting Diode are the main ones, as far as consumers are concerned. That is also the order in which they became popular. With each succeeding technology, the light output per watt and the lifetime have increased.

Q.: What exactly is an energy-saving light? And why should we care?

A.: Luminous efficacy is the lumens per watt consumed, and that is the primary measure of whether a bulb is energy-saving. The biggest polluters on the planet are the power plants. Lighting consumes about 22% of the grid power in this country. So, if you want to cut carbon emissions, buying energy efficient lighting is a meaningful way to help.

Obviously, cutting power consumption saves money. There’s another benefit: Power plants in many areas are running out of capacity, so communities are facing tough decisions about who wants the next power plant in their backyard. Most utilities in areas where population is growing are doing what they can to curb demand, not just to save money, but to avoid having to build new plants.

One thing I’d like to point out is that the easiest way to meet our energy needs in the future is through conservation. And the easiest way to conserve is to shut the lights off when you don’t need them. Use timers, occupancy sensors, or just walk over and flip the switch. As good as LED’s are, they will always consume power while they are on, so turning off the lights when you don’t need them is a no-brainer. Drive around any town or city at night and marvel at the power being wasted. It’s much worse to waste energy on lighting during the day, because that is when power plants have peak demand. And peak demand is what forces us to build new power plants.

Q.: Would you tell us some of the properties of LED lighting that make it a good product? And what is it about this new technology that might make a homeowner want to replace, say, his outdoor Christmas lighting?

LED’s have important advantages:

• They consume less power. In terms of lumens/watt, they are near fluorescents at present but will rapidly surpass fluorescents in coming years. Since LED’s are directional by nature, the actual “fixture efficiency” of LED’s can be higher than fluorescents in directional applications, such as downlights. For omnidirectional applications, such as a common table lamp, they have no advantage in directionality, and for that reason, compact fluorescents are still more efficient in generating useful light.

• They last longer, which has 2 advantages. 1) you don’t have to pay to replace them (bulb cost and labor) as often; 2) less pollution is created in manufacturing because you simply need to make fewer bulbs over time.

• They are exceedingly good at generating colored light, which is great for accent lighting. Most of the sets designed for television use LED’s now because they are rugged, compact, easy to control and less expensive than alternatives. Our linear LED strips are used on many TV shows, especially ones with state-of-the-art sound and light components such as the talent shows. Our LED lighting is also used in many homes and offices.

• They are rugged. This is probably the main reason people buy them for Christmas lights. If you use your Christmas lights for only 200 hours a year, it’s pretty hard to justify paying more for LED’s based on the energy savings. They also look nice as Christmas lights, which is the whole point anyway.

Q.: These lights seem pricey so can you tell us about the costs and the “Cost saving calculator”?

We have a great calculator with 3 different answers in increasing complexity I jokingly refer to as the a) high school answer, the b) college answer and c) the business school answer. But the truth is, not many people we deal with use a calculator to figure energy savings because it’s only one of the reasons they’re buying LED lighting.

Life is complicated enough, and to bring LED lighting to the masses, we can’t rely on complicated calculators. Instead, I’d like to give a simple piece of advice we give to everyone who calls in and says something like this: “I heard LED lighting is great, and I want to put LED lighting throughout my house. How do I get started?”

My simple advice is: “Don’t try to use LEDs everywhere.” LED lighting makes sense in areas where you use the lights a lot, such as kitchens, family rooms and landscape lighting. If you put LED lights in the guest bedroom, living room or basement that is rarely used, they won’t save you money. They cost more than regular lights, and if you put them someplace where you almost never use the lights, well, you don’t need a calculator to figure out that won’t pay.

Over time, LED lights will substitute for other types of lighting, for the simple reason that the efficacy of LED lighting is doubling every 18 months. But you have to be thoughtful about how you deploy this exciting new technology. I like to say the LED lighting industry in 2009 is about where the computer industry was in the late 1980’s. At that time, computers were very useful, but you had to be smart about how you used them. And look at how computers have grown in importance in the last 2 decades. The same will happen to LED lighting, but it won’t all happen next year.

Q.: Love, love the icicle bulbs! What can you say about them?

A.: A lot of people think the strobing icicle bulbs look really cool. But the fact is, they didn’t sell well. Let me make a point here. LED lighting is a serious technology that is helping us with some serious problems, including energy self-sufficiency and global warming. Over time, as efficacy improves, we will be increasingly focused on serious lighting for tasks and general illumination. The use of gratuitous decorative and novelty lighting is interesting to me because it introduces LED technology to people and pays some of the bills while we wait for ever-better products for serious lighting applications. The smart money is on LED’s for serious lighting needs.

Q.: What is the one coolest feature about LED? For example, from my husband’s viewpoint, (he is a diabetic with vision problems), and he said that your desk lamp is a bright light that doesn’t cause a glare and he loves it! He also said your light doesn’t give off heat? Can you speak to that?

A.: Glad he likes the desk lamp. Actually, it gives off some heat, but a lot less than traditional desk lamps. If a traditional desk lamp uses a 40 watt bulb, it’s probably giving off about 35 watts of heat. Our LED desk lamps only consume about 8 watts in total, so they can only give off about 6 watts of heat. So there’s your difference in heat.

It is worth noting that the life of an LED and its associated driver circuitry is dramatically dependent on heat management. All the serious LED lighting products on the market are designed with heat management as a primary goal. Keeping the temperature of the LED below the manufacturer’s recommended maximum is probably the number 1 challenge. The bright LED’s can get plenty hot, especially in compact bulbs and other tight situations.

Unfortunately, some homeowners and designers increasingly favor small downlights (4 inch aperatures favored over 6 inch ones, for example) for aesthetic reasons. Hey, there are only 2 energy saving light technologies in play for the homeowner: LEDs and CFLs, and they both hate heat. The more you concentrate heat by using small luminaires, the harder it is to generate big light. And that will get a bit better over time, but it’s not going away.

Q.: From an interior design standpoint, Is LED strip light or rope light more popular for home use? For example, if you were going to light a cove area, which would you use?

A.: Rope light is an old product, and the only reason we sell it is because people have heard of it. They find our web site, and if we’re lucky, they notice the LED strip lighting we sell and order that instead or call for assistance.

Rope is cheap and it’s good if you need to use hundreds of feet of it, but it has a lot of problems that our LED strips don’t.

First rope is bulky and can only be cut every several feet. If you’re lighting a cove, entertainment center, china hutch or set of stairs, working with a 3-foot cutting increment is like trying to park a bus in a motorcycle parking spot.

Our LED strips are cuttable every 1.5 to 4 inches depending on the type. Our LED strips also dim beautifully, whereas rope doesn’t. We offer color changing LED strips where the red, green and blue LEDs that mix the color are so close together that you can’t see any space between them, which gives you about 16.8 million colors to work with. RGB rope has a red one over here, and a green one over there, and there’s no way that looks like yellow unless you’re about 50 feet away.

We have sophisticated dimming and control devices, which is why the TV studios by LED strips from us to make sets for TV shows. They don’t use rope for that. And homeowners are taking a cue from the pros and using LED strips, not rope.

Q.: Do you need an electrician or are most of your lights good for a homeowner do-it-yourself project?

A.: We recommend an electrician, or at least a handy person who knows the standard precautions. To power a light in a home, you’re probably going to hook up to 120 Volts AC, and you can definitely get into trouble with that if you don’t know what you’re doing. And if you’re planning to use batteries instead, typically for a vehicle, if you short the battery, it might explode.

So LED’s are no safer or more dangerous than any other electrical device. If it’s just a matter of screwing in a bulb or plugging in a luminaire, anyone can do that. If some wiring is required, get a pro, or at least get help from somebody who knows the basics.

Q.: Is there anything else you would like to tell Home and Living Readers?

Twenty years ago the lighting industry told consumers that compact fluorescents were great, you should buy them and let’s get going. Today, the penetration of CFL’s is a miserable 6-8% of the market. Why the dismal failure? In the early days, CFL’s were dim, gave off gray light, took a long time to warm up and were not dimmable at all. Now, most of those problems have been addressed, but many people still CFL’s for the way they were years ago.

Let’s not make the same mistakes with the introduction of LED lighting. There are some truly bad LED products on the market. Buyer beware. Good LED’s can be pretty expensive, but the cost is coming down, so be patient. There are also some truly bad ideas on how to use LEDs, given their strengths and limitations.

Our goal at EnvironmentalLights.com is to help people be better consumers of LED lighting so they like the result and tell their friends.

How about if we showcase some products in a “slideshow” so customers can see more of what you’re about?