This year, the annual Greenbuild Expo was held, conveniently, in San Francisco, affording me the opportunity to visit a wide variety of product vendors to see what progress is being made in Green windows, tile, heating, solar, landscaping, water conservation, and lighting.  After traversing multiple show floors and hundreds of thousands of square feet of booths and products, just one product stood out in mind as the best in show.

Juno Lighting, one of the major manufacturers of recessed lighting fixtures, was showing a product that I’d been talking about and hoping for ever since I started doing Green building.  I’ve been installing LED recessed lighting since 2008, but while the lights dim much more smoothly than they used to and while you can get a color of LED light that approximates a warm white (about 2700 degrees K), the problem remained that when you dim LED lights, the color stays the same – they just get more dim.

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This is quite different from traditional incandescent lights that become more red and orange as they dim making for a “warmer” mood in a dimmed space.

Finally, though, a maker of LED lighting has created an LED recessed lighting fixture that creates light that becomes more warm as you dim it down (by incorporating LEDs with different color temperatures that are brought into play as the light intensity is dimmed down.  The Juno product has been christened WarmDim.  I tried it out at the Expo and it looked pretty darned good.  I won’t get a chance to try one out in a project home until later in 2013, but I’ll keep you posted!

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