Hey that was us! Toronto hydro, along with local business associations, Toronto Events and Toronto Environmental Volunteers hosted these light exchanges all around the city, not just Christie which is where I assume you were.

Note that most of the people who ran this thing weren't paid at all as almost everyone doing the actual exchange at my event was a volunteer. Toronto hydro provided us with a branded fleece vest and the BIAs supplied coupons for dinner in their respective areas.

I still like Bullfrog Power more though. Their customer service has been fabulous and unlike Toronto Hydro, their business model is based on improving the energy system rather than just making symbolic gestures like these.

Now what you need to do is find and post a HOWTO for hooking your shiny new LEDs into a solar panel and battery system to keep your house lights off the grid ;-)

Yay for the sentiment (from Toronto, where, as a cyclist, I love the extra color and light of the cheery Christmas lights everyone puts up, even if they do use more energy), BUT -- am I the only one who finds LED lights intolerably jittery? They leave flickering trailers in my aftervision, and after living in the centre of Toronto for a year (where many of the sidewalks have installed permanent LED strings on trees), they're driving me *crazy*. ? (Why does this happen; it can't be the same kind of flicker caused by poor flourescent ballast -- are the LEDs improving in this regard?)

Valentine: my guess is that for whatever reason, those LED strings that are bothering you are running on something other than continuous Direct Current (DC) power. They might be running on Alternating Current (AC) and turning on only when the current is flowing in the right direction, around 30 times a second; in some cases it might be cheaper to make a string of LED lights that worked like this than to make a string that you had to plug into an AC to DC converter. Another possibility is that the strings were being driven by a Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) device. PWM is commonly used as a method of dimming LEDs, but when it is done, it is usually done so fast that the flicker is undetectable to the human eye.

Re: LED Christmas Lights from Brookstone

From the add: "They’re 255 times brighter than conventional LEDs. . ."

255% brighter maybe (about 2&1/2 times brighter), 255 times brighter, no way.

Mr. Math

This is your problem with the LED lights (well I am almost certain this is it) Oddly I find this effect that bothers you rather pleasing :-) hehe go figure. anyway LEDS put out pretty darned coherent light. that means almost all the light goes in ONE general direction (its usually a CONE of 10-30 degrees straight out from the LED. UNLIKE normal lights that radiate light in pretty much all directions.

NOW when you put a nearly coherent light source like this into a HOUSING such as the C6 plastic tips and interesting thing happens the light "refracts" off the facets of the bulb and since most of the light is going one way it refracts in defined predictable ways so some angles really are "brighter or dimmer" than other angles giving it that living motion or "flicker" effect that I so love from them.

for whatever reason your eyes or brain is sensitive to this (for example walking on a glass floor with a honeycomb structure or looking at a plaid shirt too long is visually disturbing to me for some reason makes me feel weird)

this is probably the same thing thats happening to you except from the "flicker" effect of the LED lights.

Hope that helps !

Chris Taylor
http://www.zodiacreview.com/