The global LED tsunami

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The global LED tsunami

Delhi 15th February 2013

I am in Delhi today and tomorrow to catch up with our office here and to visit some existing and new prospective clients. It is amazing how nearly all discussions, presentations today seem to revolve around LED lighting. Some clients seem fairly well informed, for some it is a totally new and virgin terrain. It is hard to imagine that only a few years ago, we hardly talked about LED, it was just another lighting “technique”. Now anything else than LED seems to belong to the prehistoric ages. When you talk about incandescent, metal halide or fluorescent lighting you are looked at as being “retarded”. The new generation sales people do not seem to be aware that there ever was anything else than LED. And now even the new generation clients seem to assume that LED is the only viable source of lighting. It is only when I start to talk about cost benefit, return on investment and most of all about quality and performance criteria, installation issues and warranty that some start to realise that they are being brainwashed by the LED tsunami…I guess there will soon be a time that we have to educate today’s client about yesterday’s technology of lighting rather than the new (LED) technology…

Light Watch 4-27: My point is further reinforced by the recent announcement by furniture giant IKEA, that from 2016 onwards they will only sell LED lighting. IKEA was also one of the first in 2011 to stop selling incandescent lamps. OK. But in the process to (commercially) justify the full switch to LED, it is amazing to see how suddenly all the marketing talk (that used to be so favourable towards energy savers like CFL for instance) now has turned into denouncing the very same. What once was described as good is now suddenly bad. And while the LED sellers seem to focus on all the good points of the product, conveniently (or ignorantly) leaving out the bad ones, we see the same happening in reverse for the old technology. Suddenly IKEA is now denouncing CFL as bad with nothing good left, basically brainwashing you into accepting that LED is the only thing good left for your lighting. I am an IKEA user but I think it is a real shame….