You Don’t Know LEDs Until You NuLEDs

>>See a slide show of photos from the NuLEDs booth at CEDIA Expo<<

Prior to CEDIA Expo, I knew very little about LED lighting systems, but I learned a lot after meeting with Frank Sterns, new Chief Operating Officer (COO) and President at NuLEDs. The remarkable NuLEDs PoE IP-addressable LED lighting system brings a new level of control, flexibility, programmability, and energy efficiency to the market. It’s a cool system that offers a new profit opportunity to industry integrators and installers.

PoE…it’s what’s nu in lighting…

The NuLEDs system is based on Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology which allows standard category cables to carry both power and data. When plugged into the NuLEDs system, you now have a fully powered, network-controllable, IP-addressable, highly efficient LED lighting solution.

How cool are NuLEDs lighting modules? So cool that IT powerhouse Cisco Systems wanted to partner with the company to help bring this solution to the enterprise-class business market. Cisco displayed a large IT network system set up at CEDIA Expo…and it was impressive.

Cisco targets the enterprise market…

Cisco’s solution will offer large enterprises an opportunity to better control their energy usage. The combination of energy efficient LED-based lighting along with an unparalleled ability to monitor and control the system over the enterprise-wide IT network infrastructure offers companies an unprecedented opportunity to increase their energy efficiency while dramatically lowering their costs.

The NuLEDs system functions like an endpoint on the PoE network and will work in conjunction with other PoE endpoint devices such as VoIP phone systems and IP-addressable security camera systems. And, like these other systems, the plug-and-play nature of the system offers a unique combination of simplicity and flexibility.

Oh yeah, there’s an App for that…

At Expo, NuLEDs also showed an app from another partner, the Joulex Energy Manager. That’s right, the power of a PoE IP-addressable network system is that it can easily be controlled from your Apple iOS or Android mobile device through the incorporation of a simple app. The Joulex app allows for tremendous flexibility including the ability to dial up just about any of 16 million color formulation with instant results from the lighting system.

The system is so simple to set up and use that Sterns told us the potential applications are almost endless.

“Imagine a local family-practice doctor’s office,” Sterns suggested to us in the NuLEDs CEDIA booth. “With a NuLEDs LED fixture outside of each exam room, it’s simple matter to set up a color code such as green to indicate the room is available, red to mean its occupied, or blue to indicate that this is Dr. Smith’s next patient.”

Exciting scenarios…

It was easy to pick up on Sterns’ enthusiasm as he ran through several scenarios – everything from changing the color of your living room by simply dialing in a new color scheme on your iPad…to huge commercial/industrial facilities programmed to offer the perfect combination of high performance, task-optimized lighting with high efficiency – improving performance and lowering energy costs at the same time.

“It merges Green with Intelligent,” Sterns told us. Moving to IP-addressable lighting changes everything, and opens up “entirely new applications, such as lighting as a service,” Sterns told us. “Lighting could be tied-in with a fire alarm or tied-in with a panic button or with a carbon monoxide sensor or any number of things that you could think of. Once you put all of this stuff on a network, you can control lights dynamically…and that is where things are going.”

Sterns is well known and popular in the custom integration industry and the NuLEDs booth drew a steady stream of installers and integrators anxious to learn more about ways to grow their profits by offering lighting solutions such as NuLEDs. Most integrators know Sterns from his stint at Niles Audio from 1992 to 2010 where he started as a sales manager and left as President.

NuLEDs plans for the CI channel are still being formulated…

We asked Sterns what NuLEDs plans were as far as setting up distribution within the custom integration channel and he told us that these plans were just now in the works and it would be premature for him to comment. The NuLEDs PoE, IP-addressable products are only now in beta testing, scheduled to be available in early 2013.

The company is currently offering more traditional LED lighting systems which require low-voltage power and control from modules that interface with existing control and automation systems such as Crestron or Savant. But the emerging opportunity…and where NuLEDs strongly feels the market is heading…is the new PoE networked products which will be arriving next year.

For more information, check out: www.nuleds.com.

Want to get in on the ground floor? Contact new sales manager Mike “Sparky” Detmer at 305.798.8510 or email: mdetmer@nuleds.com.

>>See a slide show of photos from the NuLEDs booth at CEDIA Expo<<