At this year’s Philadelphia Green Expo (see details in this post), I was intrigued at the sight of the two fresh twenty-something faces manning the TerraGlo booth. That is when I first met Laura Giuliano, the TerraGlo CEO, and Bryan the Product Manager for the TerraGlo line of LED high efficiency commercial lighting appliances. Laura and I talked and quickly agreed to a follow-up interview.
I was curious to find out what brought Laura to her pro-environment activism?
At the source of her pro-environment stance are two life experiences:
- While waitressing one summer at a New Hope PA teahouse, Laura implemented a recycling program for the store and its customers.
- During her Senior year at Lehigh University, Laura took an Environmental Ethics class where she the occasion to engage in passionate discussions on environment related issues with some of her follow classmates.
How TerraGlo came about?
After Graduating from Lehigh University with a Political Science & International Relations degree, Laura came back home and started working at Cal-Chip Electronics Corporation of Ivyland PA. Cal-Chip is a distributor of electronic component that was founded in 1985 by Laura’s Dad.
At her Dad’s suggestion she started looking at the portfolio of products distributed by Cal-Chip Electronics. Her attention was attracted by the industrial Light Emitting Diodes (LED) that her Dad’s company was distributing. Where her Dad was focusing on distributing the chip itself, Laura decided to explore the technical feasibility and market potential of assembling sets of LEDs into light fixtures.
All research Laura and Bryan were digging out the more support they were finding for a bright future for LED based lighting products. LEDs present many advantages over incandescent light sources including:
- Efficiency: LEDs produce more light per watt than incandescent bulbs. Their efficiency is not affected by shape and size, unlike Fluorescent light bulbs or tubes.
- Color: LEDs can emit light of an intended color without the use of the color filters that traditional lighting methods require. This is more efficient and can lower initial costs.
- Size: LEDs can be very small (smaller than 2 mm2) and are easily populated onto printed circuit boards.
- On/Off time: LEDs light up very quickly. A typical red indicator LED will achieve full brightness in microseconds.[
- Cycling: LEDs are ideal for use in applications that are subject to frequent on-off cycling, unlike fluorescent lamps that burn out more quickly when cycled frequently.
- Dimming: LEDs can very easily be dimmed by lowering the forward current.
- Cool light: In contrast to most light sources, LEDs radiate very little heat that can cause damage to sensitive objects or fabrics. Wasted energy is dispersed as heat through the base of the LED.
- Slow failure: LEDs mostly fail by dimming over time, rather than the abrupt burn-out of incandescent bulbs.
- Lifetime: LEDs can have a relatively long useful life. One report estimates 35,000 to 50,000 hours of useful life, though time to complete failure may be longer. Fluorescent tubes typically are rated at about 10,000 to 15,000 hours, depending partly on the conditions of use, and incandescent light bulbs at 1,000–2,000 hours.
- Shock resistance: LEDs, being solid state components, are difficult to damage with external shock, unlike fluorescent and incandescent bulbs which are fragile.
- Focus: The solid package of the LED can be designed to focus its light. Incandescent and fluorescent sources often require an external reflector to collect light and direct it in a usable manner.
- Toxicity: LEDs do not contain mercury, unlike fluorescent lamps.
Light Emitting Diodes are still relatively expensive and require more precise current and heat management than traditional light sources.
Here are the known LEDs shortcomings:
- Some Fluorescent lamps can be more efficient.
- High initial price: LEDs are currently more expensive, price per lumen, on an initial capital cost basis, than most conventional lighting technologies. The additional expense partially stems from the relatively low lumen output and the drive circuitry and power supplies needed.
- Temperature dependence: LED performance largely depends on the ambient temperature of the operating environment. Over-driving the LED in high ambient temperatures may result in overheating of the LED package, eventually leading to device failure. Adequate heat-sinking is required to maintain long life.
- Voltage sensitivity: LEDs must be supplied with the voltage above the threshold and a current below the rating. This can involve series resistors or current-regulated power supplies.
- Light quality: The color of objects is perceived differently under cool-white LED illumination than sunlight or incandescent sources. Red surfaces are being rendered particularly badly by typical phosphor based cool-white LEDs. However, the color rendering properties of common fluorescent lamps are often inferior to what is now available in state-of-art white LEDs.
- Area light source: LEDs are difficult to use in applications requiring a spherical light field. LEDs are not capable of providing divergence below a few degrees.
- Blue hazard: blue LEDs and cool-white LEDs are now capable of exceeding safe limits of the so-called blue-light hazard as defined in eye safety specifications such as ANSI/IESNA RP-27.1-05:
- Blue Light pollution: Because cool-white LEDs (i.e., LEDs with high color temperature) emit proportionally more blue light than conventional outdoor light sources such as high-pressure sodium lamps, the International Dark-Sky Association discourages the use of white light sources with correlated color temperature above 3,000 K.
TerraGlo's Products
Laura and Bryan designed their line of commercial LED light appliances with an electronic engineer from Doylestown PA and a British lighting engineer. The TerraGlo line of Commercial LED light appliances has been available for sale since mid May 2010 and include the following items:
#1 - 2X2 ceiling drop replacement for fluorescent fixtures (i.e. T8s, T12s)
#2 Utility light: comes in various length
#3: High Hats replacements for retail, commercial and residential application
Future Plans
TerraGlo is working on exterior lights for parking lots and on a line of LED for residential applications.
In the coming months, I will check back regularly on Laura Giuliano and TerraGlo’ s progresses and on LED’s market acceptance.
Note: The advantages and shortcomings of LED technology came from a Wikipedia article on Light Emitting Diode technology. Here is the link to the Wikipedia article I used for my inspiration:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#Efficiency_and_operational_parameters
