The new Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) of Troy, NY, USA has arranged a test bed for first LED bulbs on a key building of RPI’s campus.
 
Led by director Robert Karlicek, the Smart Lighting ERC worked with campus officials to replace some of the conventional incandescent bulbs in overhead lights with LED bulbs in the nine-story George M. Low Center for Industrial Innovation (CII).
 
The new screw-in LED bulbs use just 8W of electricity, but produce as much light as a 65W incandescent bulb to take the place of 50W incandescent bulbs with an expected lifetime of 2500 hours.

The LED bulbs have an expected lifetime of 50,000 hours (20 times longer), so the LED bulbs will need to be replaced about every six years (rather than every four months for incandescents).
 
The initial batch of 119 replaced bulbs is expected to pay for itself via energy and labor cost savings within 12–16 months. Following the payback period, the bulbs are forecast to result in annual savings of $5608.

About The Smart Lighting ERC
The Smart Lighting ERC is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), industry, and New York state, and led by RPI with core partners Boston University and the University of New Mexico. Center outreach partners are Howard University, Morgan State University, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.