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The LED Lighting Facts team at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) told lighting manufacturers and testing labs last week of plans to close down its LED Lighting Facts program and shut down the database. The program will stop accepting submissions tomorrow and will shut down its website at the end of March.
“Unfortunately, due to continued federal budget and funding uncertainty, DOE will no longer be able to support the program,” the group said by e-mail. “Consequently, the LED Lighting Facts program will no longer accept product submissions after March 1, and the website will be shut down on March 30th.”
Lighting Facts was started in 2009 by the DOE with a goal to “ensure accurate and consistent reporting of SSL [solid-state lighting] product performance claims in a rapidly changing market—information essential to evaluating SSL products for market-specific applications.” The result was a distinctive label on lighting products summarizing certain performance characteristics including light output, power consumption, color rendering and color temperature and a database that grew over the years into a useful reference for the state of LED lighting product performance across the industry.
Organizations such as the Design Lights Consortium (DLC) that rely on the Lighting Facts database for some of the data they use to approve and categorize lighting products have been forced to respond to the news of LED Lighting Facts’ demise.
DLC issued a statement saying in response the organization would no longer require LED Lighting Facts submission for products to be included in its database, which is widely used by specifiers and utility rebate programs as a clearinghouse for approved lighting products.
“As the DLC has referenced and relied on LED Lighting Facts for several components of the DLC program, we are making immediate changes to the DLC SSL product application requirements to reflect the closure of the LED Lighting Facts program and streamline our process,” DLC said in its letter. “Effective immediately (2/22/18), the DLC will no longer require applicants to submit LM-79 data to LED Lighting Facts. All open applications where this information may not yet have been provided will consider this issue closed. Changes to the website and application submission portal will be made ASAP to clarify this change.”
The DLC said it would be working over the next couple of weeks on a transition plan for its LM-79 lab accreditation requirements. LM-79 is an Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES) standard for electrical and photometric measurements of solid-state lighting products. DLC expects to have the revised policy in place before the LED Lighting Facts website shuts down March 30.
Links: EdisonReport: Goodbye Lighting Facts; DLC statement: LED Lighting Facts Submission No Longer Required for DLC SSL Application