I understand your position, totally. LEDs are slowly making progress on the municipal use front with more and more cities taking part in pilot programs like Cree’s LED Cities. Have you looked at Ledtronics’ S-11 DecorLED models (http://www.ledtronics.com/ds/DEC-S11/) You’re paying about 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour? If you went over to all DecorLED’s (assuming the pubished stats hold up) the energy savings would be 88%. You’d pay $294.84 for the electricity. Assuming the light output was bright enough, which it should be (more or less) for the DecorLED since it puts out 78 lumens compared to the typical clear S-11 at 65 lumens (ignoring MSCP).

Of course, none of this takes into account the amount of money saved on replacements (lamps and labor). The average life of a typical incandescent S-11 is 1500 – 2000 hours (3500 for a long life type) compared to the average life of the DecorLED which is typically 100,000 hours. The DecorLED is shock and vibration resistant as well where the incandescents frequently are not. All that aside, the big issue is the cost. A typical S-11 (long life) is going to cost about $2.00 in single-quantities whereas the DecorLED costs $45.00 in single quantities Ouch! Of course there would be a price break at 15000 units. It will take some time to recoup the cost but you have to factor in the maintenance savings as well as the energy savings. Plus there’s the added benefit of touting how “green” the holiday display is! LOL

The reason efficacy is a hard nut to crack is that luminous efficacy takes into account the power supply of the light source (i.e. all power consumption). If manufacturers send in a cruddy power supply when they send their LEDs for independent testing, they get back lower efficacy ratings. They’ll often publish specs and then turn around and switch power supplies, redo the testing and get back better numbers. They might do this several times during a products lifetime. I feel your pain when it comes to the stats. As an LED lighting manufacturer and LED distributor, my company runs into this every day. There are plenty of dishonest manufacturers but that happens on both sides of the fence, lamp and LED manufacturers alike. They’ll use or omit whichever numbers, optical units, etc.. that make their product look favorable. Of course, there are also reputable companies out there, trying to work with the SSL lab at RDI and with the DOE to come up with standard testing methods that will eliminate these shenanigans. Until then, everyone has to order up samples and do side by side comparisons.

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“Mostly we have huge accounts with lamp suppliers that we have all over the world as we buy as a corporation. Many of the current attractions are specified and designed 5 or 6 years in advance at huge cost. LED technology and in that regard is quite new in this time frame and till recently has not managed to make in roads in terms of output. when an attraction is built often the construction costs include a contract for the first few years for maintenance thus the standard lumen use. One of the other challenges we find from LED is colour temperature. Like many things people do not grasp nor notice, and rightly so, theme parks are designed themselves right down to which road slopes which way to design a sense of feeling safe or excited. The colour temperature of LED is quite high and does not have the same warm and secure feeling of tungsten. This is a very important thing for the design teams of parks.

Hope this helps in a very small way to answer some of your questions.”