20th June, 2008
Why home theater lighting has to change—right now
Brent Butterworth
Four days ago, the lamps that have for years anchored home theater lighting systems became illegal. And that means the way you light your home theaters will have to change. Immediately.
We heard this news from Gary Meshberg, business development manager for Lightolier Controls and also president of the Home Lighting Control Alliance. According to Meshberg, Federal regulations outlawed manufacture of incandescent reflector lamps as of June 16.
Incandescent reflector lamps have long been popular in home theaters because they fit readily into a wide variety of recessed lighting fixtures now on the market, because they work with standard light dimmers, and because they’re available in a range of flood and spot patterns. Many theaters use an incandescent reflector spotlight to provide perfect reading light over the couch without washing out the screen. They’ll be missed.
What’s more, Federal standards set to take effect in 2012 may effectively ban all incandescent lamps. “The law doesn’t specifically outlaw incandescents,” Meshberg explained, “but it imposes a lumens-per-watt standard that no incandescent bulb can meet.”
A replacement for incandescent reflector lamps is readily at hand: the screw-in halogen bulb. Meshberg said these bulbs are dimmable, produce a pleasing shade of white, and deliver a more focused pool of light that’s well-suited for home theater illumination. And of course, their power consumption is lower. The downside? A survey of websites by The Integrator found the cost of these bulbs is about double that of incandescent reflector lamps.
New theater designs can use smaller, cooler-running halogen bulbs, such as the popular, readily available MR16. Many of the theaters we’ve seen in the last couple of years already use MR16s.
No answers are on the horizon for 2012, though. “It’s the first time I’m aware of that they put an energy law in place without a go-to,” Meshberg commented. “Only one screw-in lamp, the Philips Halogena, can meet that standard.” [Editor’s Note: Lightolier is owned by Philips.]
The increasingly popular compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb is one obvious replacement for incandescents, despite nagging environmental and safety questions related to their mercury content. Many recently designed CFLs emit a warmer, more reddish light than the bluish hues of the original CFLs, so in most household applications, replacing incandescents with CFLs is no problem.
In home theaters, though, CFLs are a lousy choice for now, mainly because home theater lights are almost always connected to dimmers. “You can dim CFLs,” Meshberg says, “but that doesn’t mean you should. When you dim an incandescent, the color temperature gets warmer, more like candlelight. But the opposite is true with fluorescents—they get more blue, and it’s uncomfortable. One blog I read said it makes a room look like a late-night bus terminal.”
“Another problem is performance,” he added. “The CFLs of today tend to flicker when you dim them, and below about 30 percent brightness they often just turn off.”
Bulb manufacturers are working to address these issues, and we’ll report on solutions as we find them. Meanwhile, it’s a frightening situation indeed for integrators, but Meshberg does see one upside: “I think that it’s going to spur more thought into lighting design.”
Posted at 12:00 pm |
On June 23, 2008 at 2:13 pm Steven Kippel said:
June 23, 2008 at 2:13 pm
What about LED lamps? They’re becoming more popular now. Because of their color, dimming ability, almost infinite lifespan, and very high lumens-to-watt ratio. This is the future of home lighting.
On June 24, 2008 at 7:28 am randy said:
June 24, 2008 at 7:28 am
Fluorescent lights are great if you want your house to look like Wal-Mart. The way fluorescent lights generate light make them unsuitable for residential applications… unless you have a 50,000 square foot room in your house.
Lighting manufacturers should spend less time creating terms like CRI and manipulating definitions of terms like efficacy and more time developing a product that works in residential applications.
On July 10, 2008 at 12:13 pm Brent Butterworth said:
July 10, 2008 at 12:13 pm
LEDs definitely hold promise - and yeah, they probably are the future - but they require a very different electrical infrastructure in the home.
They can be dimmed effectively only through pulse-width modulation - i.e, cutting the light on and off very rapidly. That’s why LED bike lights flicker when you choose the low-brightness settings. VERY annoying in the home. It can be fixed but it will take substantially different engineering for the control systems.
And they need typically 3.3 volts DC, not 120 volts AC. I seem to recall they have screw-in LED lamps with built-in switching power supplies, but that’s a clumsy and expensive solution.
I expect LED lighting to grow rapidly on the specialty/design side, but predict it’ll be a while before it becomes a part of household systems.