Beware the LED Stampede

First off, let me congratulate you on getting Jim Brodrick, author of "Lessons from the Field"(LD+A, June), to list the names of manufacturers of LEDs that are cited in his article. I understand that this is a DOE "Gateway" project, but it always puzzled me why the DOE "CALiPER" studies of LEDs, which revealed that four out of five LED manufacturers exaggerate claims for their products, refuse to divulge the names of those suppliers as a public service. Imagine if Consumer Reports or the DOT refused to provide the names of poorly performing products or cars. The DOE has a strange way of protecting taxpayers. As to the article, after warning that "LED lighting products simply haven't been around long enough for us to see how they perform in real-world settings" the author goes on to cite that "glitches of one kind or another are bound to emerge" but only cites the life rating claims as one of them. Some of us have had field experience regarding problems with short life of drivers; catalytic capacitors that fail thermally, mostly from mutual heating effects; circuits opening because of low power factor and excess harmonic currents; and units that are used outdoors though not suitable nor UL-listed for wet locations, not to mention claims of lumen outputs that don't meet published data and claims of equivalency in output to MR16 and PAR lamps that are wildly exaggerated.