Inside Segway Dean Kamen's Off-the-Grid Island Home

He calls himself Lord Dumpling, and his island "nation" has a zero-tolerance policy for incandescent lights. In fact, he claims to have the first fully self-powered nation. He is Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway electric scooter and other devices, some of which are responsible for making his island home self-sustaining—along with a lot of LEDs (light emitting diodes).

Kamen's vacation home is a lighthouse on North Dumpling Island, off the Connecticut coast but technically a part of New York state. In the 1990s Kamen jokingly seceded in a zoning dispute over the installation of a wind turbine. He was later allowed to install the 10-kilowatt turbine, and signed a "non-aggression pact" with former President George H.W. Bush.

All was well between the "countries" until a couple of years ago, when the U.S. Coast Guard decided to cut the undersea cable that powered the lighthouse. Kamen's island would have to be self-sustainable, with solar panels powering the lighthouse.

"I applaud the decision to do that and to be greener, but I realized that within a few months, I was going to be entirely cut off," Kamen says. "Lighting is my major need for power on the island." So he talked to his friend, Fritz Morgan at Philips Color Kinetics. Philips is one of the country's leading LED makers, and was awarded a grant for LED development by the U.S. Department of Energy.

"I wanted to design and build the world's neatest home lighting system, and at the same time make the island more plausibly zero-carbon and a net producer of energy," says Kamen.

More efficient lighting had to be a big part of that. Only there was one problem: "Not until last year was the technology available to do a whole house with LEDs," says Morgan. Even Philips' advanced LEDs were sold largely for low-light solutions under cabinets or for highlighting exteriors, for example. Reliable and efficient overhead recessed lighting just wasn't widely available. In fact, Kamen's house is using some of Philips' PAR 38 recessed LED lamps, which won't be available commercially until 2010.

Whole Lotta LEDs

According to Morgan, roughly 350 lighting fixtures on the island will be replaced with LEDs when the project is complete. Several 13-watt PAR 38 LED lamps replaced the existing 60-watt recessed incandescent bulbs in the living room, kitchen and hallways. Philips' eW Profile lighting strips went under the cabinets in the kitchen. Surface-mounted downlights were installed in the basement, and soft eW Cove lighting was installed in the soffits.

Outside, Philips' ColorBlasts replaced flood lighting, and some ColorGraze lamps were used to downlight the brick exterior of the house. Some Color Blasts were placed around the replica Stonehenge—yes, Stonehenge—on the property.

"We wanted to accent details throughout the island, so we added a bunch of accent and effects lighting," says Morgan. "Even after adding that, we still use a total of about half the consumption he had before," from about 10 kilowatts to 5 kilowatts.

"I have to admit that going in, I thought we would have some problems with lighting everything, and there's a lot of wood tones in the house," says Morgan. "The downlights worked better than expected. Some were actually too bright, so we installed dimmers. Some of the PAR lamps we made were for medium floods, so we had to put some diffusion films on them, because the beams were too narrow."

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