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2011年12月1日 星期四

Light up!

Dust off your Santa statues, make sure all the batteries in your electric holiday trinkets are good to go and be sure to plug in your lights to see if they're all working and blinking.

And if you've always wanted to decorate your home on the outside in the spirt of the Christmas season, go ahead. Chances are small that you'll see your festive actions on your December electric bill.

"Bigger things that affect the bills in December have to do with electric heating. A lot of people in town plug in strip heaters to supplement their gas for instance," Bob Stevenson, general manager at the Hannibal Board of Public Works, said. "That probably has a way bigger effect on electric bills than the lights."

However, unless you decorate like Clark Griswald (from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation) or John Freiling of rural Hannibal, you will see a spike in your electric bill.

Freiling, who does technical work for the James O'Donnell Funeral Home, sets up a half-mile home display along Carrs Lane each Christmas season. It's run entirely by computer and he has his own FM station for drivers to listen to as they pass by.

"In my case, it definitely goes up," Freiling said. "We put up almost half a million lights, so our bill goes up from an average $250 to almost $1,000."

And even though Freiling's many illuminated displays, trails of messages and candy canes raises his electric bill, he said it's an increase he said he doesn't mind at all.

Stevenson said those getting into the holiday spirit shouldn't worry about their own bills when it comes to decorating outside.

"A hundred-watt strand of lights will burn for about 10 hours for nine cents. If you had 100 of those strands around your house — which would be a lot — it'd be $9 an hour," Stevenson said. "A hundred watts for an hour is 9/10 of a cent. So if you had 10 of those strands, you'd have 1000 watts. It's really pretty cheap."
It's also the choice of Christmas lights that can result in different energy usage numbers.

"The way to go nowadays is LED," Freiling said. "They use about 10 percent of a regular light bulb. Your miniature light bulbs would be next and then the worst offenders are the C-7s and the C-9s. A C-9 is the old fashioned outdoor type of light and a C-7's kind of the old fashioned indoor.

"The LEDs are much better. They don't fade, the light they generate is pure light and it actually generates that color of light. They last for a long time and there's filament in them, so if you drop the bulb it's not going to hurt it."

2011年11月29日 星期二

Potentially disruptive AC-LEDs

Novel AC-LED products have the potential to complicate the driver market. In its purest form, the AC-LED eliminates the driver, using the diode features of the LED to replace conventional diodes. Other designs use some basic components to limit the current, but sparingly. If highly successful, the AC-LED could make some LED lighting products – such as replacement bulbs – more competitive and greatly expand the LED-lighting market. Such a move could be good for both the LED industry and the end users, but would displace potential driver sales for those products.

However, we expect that AC-LEDs will have an impact only in certain product segments. In replacement bulbs, the pressure to innovate is so high that the AC-LED is just one of several novel solutions, and there is no room for older, less-innovative designs. Consequently, there are plenty of opportunities for everyone.

The high-voltage LED (HV-LED) is another buzz word but it will have minimal impact on the driver market. LED-based products commonly use long strings of LEDs in series. Until recently, the LEDs have been packaged in discrete packages and assembled together in the luminaire or lamp.

An HV-LED integrates the LED string onto the same chip or within the same package, gaining some advantages for the customer. It means little to the driver design, other than the usual considerations for the LED load that impacts every product design.

Estimates for IC pricing also complicate the forecast. It's obvious that IC prices decline over time as volumes increase and margins shrink. What's not as clear is the effect on the average price of changes in the product mix.

New products can appear at much higher prices than more-mature products in the same category, but can earn the difference via savings in component count or improved LED performance. The new products may be priced higher because they use a larger chip that takes up more wafer area, because they use a more expensive foundry process, or simply because they deliver more value, and can earn greater margin for the chip supplier.

Temporary oversupply or shortages of products within the supply chain – such as driver ICs, LEDs, or the end products – also create fluctuations in prices. We ignore these short-term fluctuations; in our studies we focus on the underlying medium-term trends in demand and technology.

LEDs are relatively uniform and easy to understand – compared to drivers. As one supplier said, explaining drivers requires a deep dive, but few customers have the patience or expertise to listen for very long. Yet, with some patience, LED drivers can be appreciated as a critical partner to LEDs, which garner so much attention.

Tom Hausken is Director of the Components Practice at Strategies Unlimited, a market research firm based in Mountain View, California. The company's most recent market-research report on LED Driver ICs was published in June 2011.

2011年11月28日 星期一

What's So "Smart" About a Smart Home?

One of the biggest challenges in our country is to conserve our energy supply. Energy, usually starting in the form of natural gas or other fossil fuels, is burned or converted to electricity to supply heating, cooling, illumination, and other household conveniences.

It is estimated that an average home wastes about 30% of the energy used for heating and cooling due to poor household insulation. The U. S. Department of Energy estimates an annual cost of about $1,900 per household in lost energy savings. And that doesn't count the energy we use for lighting, appliances, computers, video games, and many other things we might take for granted.

So, what have the designers of SmartHome Cleveland done to address these and other environmental challenges? They have incorporated a variety of technologies to reduce this home's heating and cooling demands to about 10% of that required by the average home, and they have reduced the need for primary energy consumption to about 30% of that used in the average home. Let's take a closer look at some of these technologies and the strategies to employ them.

The first design principle was to create an air-tight system of super insulation. This involved installing an insulated concrete foundation and walls one foot thick that use a combination of synthetic foams and natural cellulose. High-performance triple-pane windows seal in the heat and keep out the cold. Even the joists and beams in the house's construction were insulated to prevent conduction of the home's heat to the outside. Even the little bit of heat that would normally escape to the outside is channeled back into the incoming air.

Large windows with a southern exposure are used to allow the sun's heat energy into the home during the winter. Instead of a furnace, the SmartHome uses the sun's heat energy and a small, ductless, air-source heat pump to provide winter heating. The inside-outside air exchange in the house is rated at about 0.6 changes per hour.

A typical home exchanges its internal air supply with the outside about 3 to 6 times per hour. By comparison, a drafty, poorly-insulated home might be exchanging its complete air system with the outside as much as 20 times per hour! In northeast Ohio, with winters averaging about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, you can calculate that you might have to heat a poorly insulated house 33 times for every 1 time in the SmartHome!

A solar panel array and a storage/conversion system provide the home's electricity. Enough electricity is generated to power the heating-cooling-ventilation system and the energy-efficient appliances and LED lighting. The large southern windows also provide a special kind of directional shading. In the summer, when the sun is higher in the sky and more heat energy is concentrated in the northern hemisphere, the shading reflects the sun's rays back toward the outside. The heat pump, insulated walls, and roof also help to maintain a comfortable summer temperature.

Outside the house, the roof, a rain garden, and pervious pavement channels up to 500 gallons of rain water and storm runoff to a storage cistern and irrigation system. This reduces the demand on the city sewer system and provides recycled water used to keep the shade trees, lawn, and garden plants healthy during the hot Ohio summer.

2011年11月24日 星期四

Energy Efficient Lighting for Commercial Markets

For more than 130 years, the world has relied on variations of incandescent and gas-discharge lamps to illuminate commercial buildings. With the rise of the general-illumination white LED lighting only a few years ago, the lighting industry is experiencing its first revolutionary change since the commercialization of the fluorescent lamp in the 1930s.

As the semiconductor and software industries converge on the traditional lighting world, Pike Research expects that the lighting industry will see more change in the next five years than in the previous 50. By the end of our 10-year outlook, LED solid state lighting will not only capture over 50% of the global market, but the extraordinary lifetimes of these lamps will drive a steady decline in the commercial lamp market despite a steadily growing base of new buildings and access to electricity in emerging countries.

Today's market includes a flurry of start-ups and global giants spending the vast majority of their development resources on putting the LED payback period on par with that of fluorescent. Not only are LED costs projected to decline rapidly, but each year those projections are accelerated; an indication that the rate of change continues to be underestimated.

But for at least the next several years, LEDs are out of reach for the general illumination market and are seeing early success in niche markets and applications. For the mass energy efficiency market, the most influential market drivers are energy codes, rebates and incentives, all of which raise the minimum standards and effectively pare out the least efficient - such as incandescent lamps.

On the cutting edge of efficiency, certifications such as the USGBC's LEED, publicly funded projects, and those supported by conservationists are raising the bar on high standards and pulling energy code requirements up in the process.

This Pike Research report describes the key factors that are influencing the market for energy efficient lighting around the world: trends in energy codes, rebate and subsidy programs, sustainability/green certifications, raw material supply issues, geopolitical influences in developing and developed nations, and more.

The report describes the influence of industry structure, key applications, and the many technology issues involved in the decision to specify various lighting technologies. Comprehensive unit and dollar forecasts are presented through 2021, segmented by application, lamp type/LED, luminaires, and geographic region.

2011年11月13日 星期日

School district to study energy-saving measures

A host of money- and energy-saving capital improvement projects will be up for approval at an upcoming Delaware city school board meeting.

Larry Davis, director of facilities and transportation, on Nov. 7 described to the board projects he expects can lower the district’s energy costs by $226,500 annually. The projects include insulation replacement in 11 district buildings, as well as lighting improvements in nine buildings.

“Every one of the schools is affected first of all by lighting,” Davis said. “(One of) the things that we can do to conserve electrical energy (is work on) the lighting going through our buildings.”

Davis has seen the district through the conversion from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent lights and is now transitioning the district to newer, more efficient lighting. “It’s just a normal progression,” he said. “$115,000 of our annual savings is going to come strictly out of lighting.”

Additional savings could be achieved by replacing the boilers at Hayes High School, which were installed when the school was built in the 1960s, Davis said.

“They’re still in there as we speak right now,” he said. “We’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining them, but it also runs up our operating costs.”

Also at Hayes, Davis said, the district can install a water reclamation system that will allow non-potable water to be used for the building’s air-conditioning condensers.

“We have to constantly run … potable, good water in the tower,” Davis said.

The final costs of the improvements have yet to be calculated. Davis said he would have more concrete figures to present to the board at its next meeting, a work session scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Nov. 28.

Also at the meeting, Superintendent Paul Craft announced the district was awarded two Soar Awards for High Progress from Battelle for Kids.

The first is the most-improved award. “The district itself is being identified as among the top five of all (135) participating Soar districts,” Craft said.

In addition, Hayes High School is receiving an award for its improving student test scores.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony Nov. 14 at the Greater Columbus Area Convention Center.

2011年11月8日 星期二

Energy efficient lamps

 GreenChance Inc. announced today unique, versatile products to add to a wish list - the award-winning patented NEOZ Cordless Lighting system – dimmable, rechargeable and elegant luminaries, which provide endless flexibility and easily add beautiful light to any space. The Cordless Lighting concept pioneered by NEOZ since 1995 is enjoyed in over 90 countries worldwide from “The Ritz Hotel” in London to “The Oak Room at The Plaza” in New York to “The Burj Al Arab” in Dubai.

“NEOZ Cordless lamps provide unmatched performance and have two bulb options, halogen bulbs, which offer the best possible color rendering of skin tones, food colors and textures or, our new NEOZ-designed, energy efficient LED bulbs, which provide longer light time and extended service life,” said Rainer Heimann, founder and CEO of Los Angeles-based GreenChance, the exclusive distributor of NEOZ Cordless lighting in North America. “NEOZ lamps are easy to use and with the touch of a button you can choose between 5 settings to create your desired ambiance, from a candle flicker up to 20 times brighter than a candle—bright enough to read menus while maintaining intimacy.”

NEOZ Cordless lamps can be used in a variety of settings indoor or outdoors and are the ideal lighting solution as the lamps have a long battery life and can be placed anywhere independently of electrical power outlets. NEOZ Cordless lamps provide up to 260 hours of lighting on a single charge, depending on the choice of bulb and rechargeable battery, and are easy to recharge, simply place the lamp onto the base station and the intelligent lamp controller fully regulates the battery charging process.

“NEOZ Cordless Lighting is a safer and brighter solution than candles, as the lamps will not blow out in the wind, will not emit smoke, odor or have wax spills,” said Peter Ellis CEO of NEOZ Lighting. “NEOZ Cordless lamps are designed for long life as they are made with the highest quality components and materials, are recyclable and are fully serviceable which has made the name NEOZ synonymous with reliable, durable, rechargeable lights.”

GreenChance Inc. is a provider of distinctively unique solutions that create intimate and eco-friendly settings both indoor and outdoor. GreenChance is constantly growing their range of products determined to provide the finest ambiance for all environments, commercially and residentially. GreenChance carries products that are innovative, high quality and design oriented. GreenChance Inc. is the exclusive distributor of NEOZ, Mensa Heating and Heatscope products in North America.

2011年10月18日 星期二

NHRA: Karen Stoffer Firebird Raceway final report

GEICO Suzuki rider Karen Stoffer raced to a quarterfinal finish Sunday at the 27th annual Arizona NHRA Nationals to remain fourth in the Full Throttle championship points standings.

Stoffer qualified fifth in the 16-bike elimination field with a 6.970 at 190.32 mph, although her path to the lofty mark wasn't without drama.

"We had an issue with me on the top end on the second (qualifying) hit, where I caught a bump at the same time I hit the brakes," Stoffer said. "I had to put my foot down to keep the GEICO Suzuki upright. No problems there: The bike was fine, I was fine. I just had to get a new pair of shoes.

"We had another gremlin with 'Wilson' (the nickname of an engine) in the bike, and it wouldn't shift on two of our hits. Lucky enough, we got into the fifth spot. Unfortunately, on that last qualifying hit, it broke the motor."

The team had a long Saturday evening swapping out powerplants, leaving Stoffer feeling a bit anxious before her first round match-up with No. 12 qualifier Justin Finley. But when the two riders staged, Finley got a little too anxious and jumped the green light by -.007 seconds, giving Stoffer the win by disqualification.

"We swapped motors after qualifying and put 'Maverick' in for our first round race against Finley," Stoffer said. "Then it blew up on the top end.

"We rushed back and had to put 'Wilson' back in there, and it didn't shift again when we lost to Matt (Smith). It was all we could do. We had to go out on a wing and a prayer."

With her bike not shifting into top gear, Stoffer surrendered the lead and the race to second-round opponent Smith, who won with a 6.974 at 191.73 mph to Stoffer's resigned 7.066 at 189.42 mph.

"I'm so proud of the team," she said. "We thrashed all weekend long. The boys did a phenomenal job getting that thing going and putting it all together. They gave me a great bike.

'When it's hot like this it becomes V-Twin weather, which you can clearly see if you look at who's in the top four and how fast they're going. The fastest Suzuki out here just doesn't compare in these kind of conditions. If you're on a Suzuki here, you've got to have luck on your side, and we didn't really have it."

The NHRA tour takes a weekend off before heading to The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway Oct. 28-30 for the 11th annual Big O Tires NHRA Nationals.

"Hopefully, going to Vegas, conditions will level out a little bit more, and it'll help the Suzukis out," Stoffer said. "We're going to do what we can, repair all the motors we can, but realistically we're going into Vegas with one motor right now.

"It's a challenge, but the good Lord puts challenges on those who can handle it. We have a good team and we all stick together. We pulled off a lot of switches this weekend, and we were able to get out there. We didn't hang anybody out on the starting line, we made the call, we did a good job."