Jim Uphoff: We're doing this because we want to make
sure that our customers feel safe and secure in the purchase
that they're making and that they can rely on the investment
they are making in ETC.
One of the most common questions. I get in my position is about
the longevity of our fixtures. How long will they last?
People looking for L70 statistics,
people asking about the components and how long
they're going to last. We know
that this new technology, as great as it is, is not
the least expensive way to light a theater or a venue.
So there's a large investment being made in these fixtures
and people want to know that they are buying
a quality product.
Mike Wood: Let's start with LEDs don’t just stop working.
We're all very familiar with incandescents
and fluorescent lamps, where the end of life
is very well-defined. It just stops. One day the
fluorescent won't strike. The fillament burns out
on your incandescent. There’s no real argument about
when the end of life is. LEDs don’t work that way.
An LED just gets dimmer. It’ll just keep getting dimmer.
It'll probably never actually completely go out.
So you have to find some way of saying
when is this end of life? The way that the industry
as a whole has chosen is to use L70.
That at 70 percent of its original output, we’re saying
this lamp has reached the end of its life. To run the test
for L70 it has to be run at its nominial output,
at its full output, at its standard rated operating
temperature everything as it would normally be run
in a fixture. It's not that easy to measure.
And if we see a fixture or an LED which says it has an L70
life of 50000 hours, does that mean that the’ve run
it for five years? No it doesn't.
That's obviously impractical. You have to be able to run these
tests in an accelerated time frame.
Otherwise you'd never be able to ship a product.
So what's been laid down by the IES is a method
for doing shorter tests. And you do a test in blocks
of 1000 hours.
You run your LED for 1000 hours at it’s rated temperature,
and current, and power.
And then you measure its light output.
And then you do it for another 1000 hours and you measure
the light output again. And what this standard allows
you to do, is to do this through a minimum
of six thousand dollars. So it's still at least
two-thirds of a year, eight months.
And the standard allows you to multiply by up to six
times as a maximum. So if you test for 6000 hours,
you can claim a life of 36000 hours.
Anybody who’s claiming more than 60000 hours is probably working
to this standard because the standard tops out
at 60000 hours. It should be clear that L70
is a standard for LEDs. It's not
a standard for luminaires. So you have to be sure that when
you put it in your luminaire that you're running it exactly
as the manufacturer of the LED intended.
Dave Cahalane: So ETC will send off to a nationally recognized
test lab a set of end products that are operating
at final conditions. And that test lab will run those
fixtures over a period of time. One of the advantages of running
LM-84 testing is it allows us to test the complete luminaire
in its actual drive conditions and
actual temperature conditions. So our test data is reflective
of what an end user will experience.
Jim Uphoff: So we decided to do this testing, this LM-84 testing
to get actual L70 statistics for our fixtures as a whole.
Our first round of testing, which included the Source Four
LED Series 2 Lustr, and the ColorSource Spot,
which were previously rated at 20000 hours for L70,
now carrying a rating of 54000 hours based on this testing.
So because of that we've decided to go back and test our existing
product line as well as going forward test all new products
using this LM-84 standard so that we get accurate results for
the fixtures that are being shipped, not just
for the components that are in them.
So by doing all this research into LM-84 testing and getting
accurate L70 ratings for our products, it started
a lot of conversations around ETC about the overall quality
and reliability of our products. We have taken this opportunity
now knowing that we can rely, not only on the longevity
of the LEDs, but also in the other components that we
have within our fixtures to make a change to our warranty.
So we are announcing, as of right now that all of our
fixtures will get extended warranties.
So any fixture will now carry a 5 year warranty
on the entirety of the fixture, as well as a 10 year warranty on
the LED array itself. This is for all non-retrofit LED
products made by ETC. We're doing this because we want
to make sure that our customers feel safe and secure
in the purchase that they're making and that they can rely on
the investment they are making in ETC.
So if anybody's looking for more information on this, our
L70 testing, LM-84 testing, or our new warranty statement,
they can find that information at our website as well.