Lots of LEDs showing up in retail coolers

[blasterman]

I've noticed the past couple of months that a lot of LED strips are showing up in chain Grocery Store coolers and freezers. Yes, you can tell when you're an LED/Lighting Geek when you open the freezer door to get a better look at the LED strip and ignore the Dove Bars :thumbsup:

Just like home lighting though it looks looks there's a lot of variance out there, and not all the best implementation.

First ones I noticed were at Walgreens ( or was it CVS). Display cooler lights are now LED, but aren't sufficient for product illumination and too dim. They are also very, very cool in color. My grade: D+ / Special on Toffe coated popcorn A-.

Next ones I noticed were at Meijers. Now these puppies were bright, product illumination was spot on, and the color was neutral white, darn near 4100k. Opening the door revealed them as Sylvania Strips. LEDs spaced about 6" apart. That means they are Osrams - high flux? I'd give Meijers a solid 'A' for implementation. A D- for blocking off the frozen pizza aisle at 1am.

 

[purduephotog]

I've noticed the past couple of months that a lot of LED strips are showing up in chain Grocery Store coolers and freezers. Yes, you can tell when you're an LED/Lighting Geek when you open the freezer door to get a better look at the LED strip and ignore the Dove Bars :thumbsup:

Just like home lighting though it looks looks there's a lot of variance out there, and not all the best implementation.

First ones I noticed were at Walgreens ( or was it CVS). Display cooler lights are now LED, but aren't sufficient for product illumination and too dim. They are also very, very cool in color. My grade: D+ / Special on Toffe coated popcorn A-.

Next ones I noticed were at Meijers. Now these puppies were bright, product illumination was spot on, and the color was neutral white, darn near 4100k. Opening the door revealed them as Sylvania Strips. LEDs spaced about 6" apart. That means they are Osrams - high flux? I'd give Meijers a solid 'A' for implementation. A D- for blocking off the frozen pizza aisle at 1am.

GE makes this sort of product- it's called "Immersion" and they've got some pretty good writeups from the DOE (or so I'm told- I'm waiting for them to send me the links).

 

[Illum]

I've noticed the past couple of months that a lot of LED strips are showing up in chain Grocery Store coolers and freezers.

finally, someones finally paying attention to heatsinking
I think a few CREEs running 700ma wouldn't be too bad either...especially if the temperature is -5~0C all year around:nana:

 

[csshih]

:lol:

hmm.. now, we need transparent housings for those coolers, too.

 

[blasterman]

The Meijers / Sylvania strips were throwing out a fair amount of heat. They looked goo though, especially in the beer coolers.:thumbsup:

 

[JohnR66]

Golden Dragons perhaps? I have one in a Sylvania stick up light. Around 4500K, high CRI. Non of my XR-Es look quite as nice.

WalMart has freezers detect you walking by and turn on the LED strips as you get near. They had these for a couple years but only in one store near me.

 

[Turbo DV8]

Not exactly a cooler, but I visited the War museum in Old Town Sacramento a few weeks ago. They tried to go high-tech/energy saving on all their displays by using exclusively LED strip lighting, and it was a complete disaster. First, the LED's that did work leaned just as close to blue as a white LED could without being called a blue LED. Second, nearly every strip had multiple non-functional LEDs, LED's just barely glowing, or entire portions of the strip just dead. Combine those two and you couldn't even see the old postcards or pictures or any of the identifying text without straining your eyes so hard you burst a blood corpuscle. It was a pretty pitiful example of "high-tech." No wonder LED still has a stigma for a lot of people.

 

[JohnR66]

Yes, an unfortunate symptom of the China syndrome. Someone in charge got suckered into lousy quality LEDs by some slick salesman. Cheap fading blueshifting junk that performs like crap. Now they have to spend oodles to get proper lighting and it probably won't be LEDs as they have been turned off by the previous junk.:shakehead

 

[Illum]

American products are the same...the thing is, 5mms were never meant to be used more than indicator lights. Integrating them into mainstream lighting is an error both countries have made:thinking:

if your going to with LED, my goodness start on the 1W level....

 

[blasterman]

Golden Dragons perhaps? I have one in a Sylvania stick up light. Around 4500K, high CRI. Non of my XR-Es look quite as nice.

They were about 50-60 lumens if I were to guess at their brightness. Probably dragons given their popularity in Osram/Sylvania light strips. Light looked good and was perfectly uniform as any high end commercial strip.

It's the American/European companies that have engineers that spec out the better LED products, even though it might be manufactured in East Asia. The real junk is mostly created entirely in Asia from top to bottom. Quickest way to tell is over-using 5mm LEDs at high densities, which typically shows the designer is factoring in cheap labor over everything else. I'm wondering if the Hong Kong companies will ever get out of this mindset.

High-Flux and power LED light strips are starting to get a solid reputation for commercial apps, and deservedly so. The Alu lightbar and stars we use for DIY project shows also shows it's a good topography all around.