Denny’s Corporation, America’s largest full-service family restaurant chain, has chosen energy-efficient LED lights from Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE) as the preferred lighting standard for all its new and remodeled stores across the United States. Cree’s award-winning LR6™ six-inch downlights are being specified in various applications, including dining areas and restrooms in all newly constructed and converted facilities.
 
“We evaluated numerous LED light fixtures from a variety of manufacturers to ensure that we chose the best possible product and partner for this major lighting specification,” explained Mitch Riese, corporate architect, senior manager of design & construction, Denny’s. “With the Cree LR6 fixture, we found the best value for our money, helping us deliver beautiful, warm light, while significantly reducing our energy consumption and maintenance requirements.”
 
Pete LaBarre, a Denny’s franchisee in Colorado Springs, Colo., is already seeing extensive savings since converting to LED lighting. LaBarre has installed more than 400 Cree LR6 downlights in the dining rooms of his five restaurants, a move that has saved him around $15,500 per year in energy costs alone. Impressed with the energy and maintenance savings from installing LR6 downlights in his dining rooms, LaBarre has decided to use the six-inch LED downlights in a variety of other applications. Currently he has replaced 500 fluorescent bulbs and tubes with 200 Cree LR6 fixtures, illuminating the perimeter of each restaurant.

"Our lights stay on all the time, so we did a watt comparison of what we had in place before the LR6 downlights,” said LaBarre. “We found that we used 6,000 kilowatt hours less per month in the store that had the Cree fixtures versus the store that had the fluorescent lighting,” he said.

Another early LED lighting devotee is Joey Terrell, a Denny’s franchisee in Illinois. In 2009, Terrell opened his second restaurant in Joliet, a suburb of Chicago. Built according to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold standards, the Joliet Denny’s includes a combination of natural lighting and Cree LR6 LED downlights to reduce the restaurant’s lighting load.

According to Terrell, this lighting design reduced utility costs by 83 percent and his electricity bill is now around $1,000 a month instead of the expected $2,100 a month based on the average costs for his Mokena, Ill. location.

“Restaurants use 285 percent more utilities than the average commercial building,” said Terrell. “The easiest way to reduce these costs and improve energy-efficiency is to switch from traditional fluorescents to daylighting and LEDs, and that’s what we did.”

“Denny’s is a great example for any restaurant chain looking to become more energy-efficient,” said Craig Lofton, Cree LED Lighting vice president of sales. “Not only can switching to LED lighting offer energy savings and maintenance avoidance, but the Cree LR6 downlight delivers the quality of light customers want.”