Going Green with Landscape Lighting.

There's no need for a law when a brochure will do the trick.

Payperpost comes through as usual when I'm stuck for an idea outside of my obsession range.

In this case, I was struck by an appeal to create buzz for a site that isn't really there yet, but will be, and which is dedicated to LED landscape lighting. While you cannot yet (as of the date of this posting) acually buy their LED outdoor lighting-, they have a lot of reasons as to why you will want to:

Ernst & Young Plaza in downtown Los Angeles is decorated with a web-like truss-structure ornamented with 3,400 light bulbs. The owner of the Ernst & Young Plaza recently switched the lights with LED lights.

The incandescent lights that were replaced by LEDs had a typical life of 3,000 hours or less, which equals a useful life of about 10 months. For the Ernst & Young Plaza this meant that an average of 340 bulbs had to be replaced each day. The labor cost associated with this exceeded $10,000 each year.

The replacement LEDs will last for more than 50,000 hours or 13 years without need for replacement.

Ordinarily I'd have given this opportunity a pass. But in this case, it's the idea more than the product, and since they reminded me of the idea, they deserve the plug.

In the ordinary run of life, Returns on Investment to that degree usually involve insider trading or products that are illegal to sell in Kansas.

LED lighting - and I do not exaggerate - will help save our planet. And it will do that in the best libertarian way, by making a few someones many bucks, while saving everyone else a significant number of bucks. lest this seem like a trivial consideration, the important thing to remember is that every single one of these dollars is created by reducing energy losses. In other words, that's money that used to go into the landfill, so to speak.

In a very real sense, when you install LED lighting, you are reclaiming lost money. Or if you prefer, lost energy. But really, the one is a symbolic representative of the other.

So, I'd strongly encourage you to consider the idea of replacing your existing landscape lighting with LEDS. This is a case where "going green" has very crisp green benefits. And when all "green choices" reach this tipping point, the "green economy" will be a reality.