A LOOK BACK AT THE NOV. 2008 EVENT
Date: November 12-14, 2008.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
The Merchandise Mart, Chicago
"Manufacturers, these are the people you need to listen to.
I really challenge you to do a better job. I'm still hearing claims now that I was hearing five years ago and that still just aren't true."
— Dane Sanders, senior lighting designer, Clanton & Assocs.
A Place for Dialogue
By Maggie Koerth-Baker, Contributng Writer
When two sides can't see each other face-to-face, seeing eye-to-eye is twice as hard. Everybody knows manufacturers and specifiers have conflicts over LEDs, but seldom do they get a chance to clear the air and cry the tears in-person. ArchLED 2008 offered all members of the LED community a unique opportunity, wrapping up its second day with a live focus group centered around the concerns of specifiers.
But this wasn't your average, polite session. Fueled by years of poor communication and broken promises—and probably a glass of wine or two—designers and specifiers weren't holding anything back during the session. The first hint of this came when Dane Sanders, a senior lighting designer with Boulder, Colo.-based Clanton & Assocs., took the podium to give a presentation that gave voice to specifiers frustrated with misleading marketing, insufficient warranties and an ever-changing technology that seemingly moves too quickly to stay up-to-date.
"First off, I want to ask who is a specifier here," Sanders said. His request was answered with loud cheers and raucous arm waving from more than half the audience. "Manufacturers, these are the people you need to listen to. I really challenge you to do a better job. I'm still hearing claims now that I was hearing five years ago and that still just aren't true," Sanders said.
His presentation was an object lesson in marketing vs. reality, as he showed several instances where LEDs failed to live up to the hype or failed outright. In some of these cases, he said, manufacturers stood by their products and took the time to make sure that the problems got fixed. But not always. Worse, he said, many manufacturers were still promoting claims that specifiers knew to be false, but their clients still believed, such as the fact that LEDs produce no heat. "I just read that last week on a manufacturer's website," he said. "Please, stop it!"
Pleas like this brought the audience to their feet, applauding and cheering like the home crowd at a championship game—which, in a lot of ways, they were. Specifiers and designers outnumbered manufacturers at the session and, after spending years feeling like the latter weren't listening to their concerns, the crowd was more than happy to make sure they were heard this time around.
"Where's GE?", one designer in the crowd asked, looking for the representatives who could speak to her specific problems.
Other specifiers wanted to know why some luminaire manufacturers wouldn't share what LEDs and components went into their fixtures—information specifiers said was vital to their ability to do their job. "Traditionally, I'm picking the lamp and luminaire. I pick the lamp because of color properties. Because LEDs are now combining those two things, to not tell me what type of LED it is unfathomable. I have no control over anything then. I understand your need to protect your business secrets, but I need that info and I don't have the time, budget, client tolerance to order samples of everything," said one frustrated audience member.
But the manufacturers' point of view didn't go unheard. Manufacturers in the audience voiced frustration with specifiers who wouldn't "put on their big boy pants" and do the product research they themselves had to do everyday. "There has to be due diligence from both sides. Education on both sides of the coin is important. People ask me for things that don't exist," said one manufacturer.
Fred Maxik, another panelist, and chief scientific officer of the Lighting Science Group, in answering audience questions, was sympathetic, and noted he well understood many of the concerns the specifiers were venting, and that many of these problems can, and will, be solved by more and better standards, most notably LM 79 and 80. At the same time, he argued, the creation of standards shouldn't be the sole burden of manufacturers. For instance, many specifiers in the crowd expressed a desire for warranties that lasted five years or more, yet current standards like Energy Star require only three-year warranties. "Everything you're asking for is reasonable. Everything you thought was of interest is of interest," Maxik said. "There really are a lot of questions you need to ask. But things like LM80 will solve some of those. Once you're educated, you'll know if you see a non-working capacitor."
"But I don't want to know about capacitors," countered Sanders. "That's not my field. I want manufacturers to handle that."
But Maxik, as well as co-panelist Mark McClear, Cree's director of business development, both put some responsibility on specifiers to educate themselves enough to know the questions to ask; or, if they don't feel comfortable enough with the technology, make the choice to sit back and wait it out, especially if they aren't getting the information they need.
"Nobody is forcing you to consider LEDs," McClear pointed out. "You at least have a notion that they can save energy, money, the environment and that you can have a good experience. But if you don't get those things? Then go back to traditional for now."
Maxik agreed, and urged specifiers to understand how the fast-changing technology was likely to solve many current problems the way it had solved old problems with LEDs. "What's changed in the past 36 months? Everything," he said. "But LEDs are a balancing act. We don't know all the answers yet, and if you want to be risk-averse, you can sit back. But we need to remember that we're not just in the infancy of one technology, but several. And they all come into play here."
But the sessions weren't just about the airing of grievances. The LED industry, throughout the course of the conference, also demonstrated some feats of strength, introducing specifiers to a pair of new tools that could make their jobs much, much easier. Kevin Willmorth, founder of the Germantown, Wisc.-based consulting firm Lumenique, and one of the conference's master of ceremonies, showed off his TCO Calculator—Luminaire Comparator, a downloadable software program, which compares the overall costs and benefits of two luminaires, giving specifiers a better idea of whether LEDs are really the best product to fill a specific need. Meanwhile, Kevin Gauna of the California Lighting Technologies Center, offered some promise for the future in the form of the 2009 Advanced Lighting Guidelines, set to be released online this spring. The guide, according to Gauna, will offer specifiers a go-to checklist that can fill some of the holes in the sometimes highly variable manufacturer spec sheets by helping non-experts know what expert questions to ask.
In the end, attendees certainly exposed some problems in the industry, but more importantly, these questions and critiques created a framework to move forward. By the end of the night, almost everybody could agree on two things: a few bad apples can be enough to spoil the whole LED industry, and second, there's no reason to use an LED product if you don't know enough about it, or feel you can't trust the manufacturer. "It's better to wait than burn out on an immature value chain and applications that aren't ready," said McClear. "But watch this space. In six months, the problems you're having could be gone."
