A recent episode of Texas Business Radio featured an interesting discussion on how to turn the world green, and had a specific spotlight on lighting innovation and energy consumption. The CEO of Texas-based US LED, Ron Farmer, visited the studio and provided his unique insights to the audience.
US LED, an LED lighting company for commercial and industrial lighting, parking lot lighting, and interior lighting in industrial, retail, office buildings, and healthcare facilities, focuses on retrofit lighting upgrades to save businesses significant money on their yearly operating costs. US LED manufactures its own industry-leading lighting products engineered by its in-house engineering team ensuring the products are designed to company quality standards.
“You have to really understand what's behind it,” explained Farmer. “This is not ‘just take this light bulb out and put the other one in.’ We do the industrial design, design the heatsink and the PC boards, specify the LEDs and how they're placed and develop the lensing to properly direct the light. That's all done by our in-house team. We don't take Chinese products and simply re-label them. As a result, we can set a standard and keep that standard across the breadth of all our products.”
US LED maintains a large catalog of lighting solutions, so its products can go into an office building and tackle almost any lighting scenario—hallways, backrooms, bathrooms, parking garages, and even parking lots. US LED also specializes in retail spaces like 24-hour convenience stores, which require constant lighting. The company has worked on lighting upgrades for over 17,000 retail stores in the United States—4,000 of those in 2017 alone.
“The differentiation is that US LED lights last longer. And not just longer than incumbent lighting—they last longer than most LED products as well,” explained Farmer. “Our products last up to 200,000 hours compared to 50,000 hours, which is the LED industry standard.”
In ten years, a standard LED lighting product must be replaced because it has dimmed by 30%. By comparison, lighting solutions from US LED will have lost only 7-8% of their light at the end of that same ten years, and a lifespan of an additional to twenty to thirty years. That's a big competitive advantage over even the largest lighting companies. There is a compelling ROI from competitive pricing and reduction in energy and maintenance costs.
“The last time I looked,” Farmer said, “19% of all the electricity produced in United States was used for lighting. We, as an industry, can save about 75% of that. So, theoretically, about three-fourths of all the power plants capacity used for lighting could be shut down. It could be huge.”