Turning a craving for color into light-bright living

EVERETT, Mass. — Joey Nicotera's fascination with colored lights bordered on obsession when he was a teenager.

He framed posters in lights and decorated his own Christmas tree. When he couldn't find a color bulb he wanted, he got paint cans and made some himself, bathing his second-story bedroom in an eerie glow.

"I'd be driving home from work at night, and I could see his room from five blocks away, with all the weird colors and flashing lights," recalls his father, Joe Nicotera Sr.

Joey is now 32 and out of the family home. But a rainbow of ever-changing colors still emanates from his living space, an 840-square-foot loft condominium in a renovated candy factory north of Boston.

Instead of painting light bulbs, Nicotera spent $5,000 to equip his bachelor pad with 54 fixtures containing light-emitting diodes, or LEDs — devices similar to computer semiconductors that convert electricity into light and stream it out of glass domes the size of matchstick heads.

A private light show

They may be pricey now, but LEDs are being touted as eventual replacements for standard, incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescents because of their growing efficiency and increasingly lower costs.

And as LEDs expand their reach into the aesthetic-minded market for home lighting, they boast something traditional lighting sources can't: LEDs can be programmed to emit light in virtually any color without the use of filters, enabling homeowners to design their own living-room light shows.

"If colored light is needed, now there is a technology that can cater to that," said Nadarajah Narendran, director of lighting research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

Meet the "Jetsons"

Nicotera counts himself among an apparent handful of lighting enthusiasts around the country who have outfitted their homes with large numbers of LEDs. Now, his pad is a popular party spot.

"I wanted a Vegas cocktail lounge look, with a 'Jetsons' flavor to it," said Nicotera, an information technology manager. "I always figured that George and Jane would have walls that changed color," he said of the cartoon characters.

Narendran says niche applications are emerging as homeowners install LEDs to light display cabinets and add color to high-end home theaters. But it's hard to say how many homeowners will follow Nicotera's example by installing color LEDs and light shows.

"It's a matter of personal preference, like fashions," Narendran said.

Light work

Nicotera installed all his LED fixtures himself. Each contains 45 to 75 of the tiny spotlight-producing LEDs, commonly used in on-off indicators for electronics and appliances. He doesn't have any incandescent bulbs and relies on 50 halogen fixtures for overhead light.

He says his 54 LED fixtures together use less electricity than a single 100-watt incandescent.

But it's the light-show capabilities that capture Nicotera's interest. He taps controls on a wall-switch panel to choose among eight programs or uses lighting-control software on his laptop to expand programming options even further. Each program varies the color and brightness of the LED arrays in hanging lamps and the LED strips in backlit wall shelving and kitchen cabinets.

The wall switch and laptop are linked to a flash memory device and a pair of VCR-sized transformers that control the lights from a hallway closet. Shelves and cabinets abruptly shift from one hue to the next or shimmer gradually through the spectrum, bathing the condo's gray walls in light.

Because of their color advantage, LEDs are being used to light display shelves at jewelry stores and supply ambience in restaurants. As for LEDs that cast white light, Narendran expects it will be five to 10 years before such products begin seriously challenging other light sources in homes.

So far, cost is the biggest obstacle, but that should change over the next few decades.

Three years ago, the first 10 fixtures Nicotera mounted in the bathroom ceiling cost $125 apiece. Since then, the cost has come down to less than $75 each. He says he hasn't had to replace or fix any of his LEDs, which are touted to run continuously for 11 years.