The Facts About Three LED Lighting Myths

LED lighting technology has steadily advanced and improved over the years. What may have been true in years past isn’t so today. This may cause people to hold onto obsolete beliefs. In addition, the Internet is a good medium for spreading opinions regardless of their validity. In short, it can get very confusing when assessing whether this technology is right for you. Here are the facts about three LED lighting myths:

MYTH: LED Lights Aren’t as Bright as Other Types of Lighting

When comparing different incandescent lights, a higher wattage means a brighter bulb. However, when comparing different types of lights, a wattage comparison isn’t appropriate. Wattage just means power consumption. Instead, compare their lumen output. A lumen is a unit of brightness just like a pound is a unit of weight. More lumens mean a brighter bulb. An LED light with the same brightness (in lumens) as an incandescent light consumes less power and will have a lower wattage rating. You will get the same brightness, but the lower power consumption reduces your electrical bill.

MYTH: LED Lights Are Cost Prohibitive

The “sticker” price of LEDs are higher but they will quickly pay for themselves in several ways. First, they’re significantly more energy-efficient than other types of lighting. The more lighting you use in your facility, the greater the energy payback in reduced energy bills.

Second, they last much longer than other types of lighting. This reduces maintenance costs. LEDs can run for years before they need replacement.

Third, LEDs are more rugged than incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lights. They withstand vibration, motion, and mechanical shock better than other lighting technologies.

MYTH: LED Lights Don’t Put out Any Heat

LEDs are highly efficient in that they convert most of the electrical power into light. However, they still produce a small amount of heat. While they aren’t hot to the touch, you shouldn’t place them in enclosures that prevent their cooling. After running them for a long time, you will feel some warmth.

LED Lighting: It’s Time to Let Go of Glass Tube Technology

LED is short for “light emitting diode.” The light emitting part of the name is easy enough to understand. However, the diode part is less so for many non-technical people. A diode is a solid state device that allows electric current to flow in one direction only. Diodes are used in electronics, and exceedingly small diode elements are present within the integrated electronics used in computers. In any case, an LED is a diode that lights up when electricity flows through it.

Before solid state devices such as diodes and transistors were invented, radios and even computers were made from glowing glass tubes called vacuum tubes. These put out lots of waste heat and didn’t last long. Thanks to solid state devices, commercial electronics and especially computers advanced rapidly. They got smaller, became more powerful, and consumed less energy. Today, the only vacuum tube based computers are found in museums.

Oddly enough, the lighting industry took much longer to make commercial use of solid state LEDs. It’s also odd that we still use vacuum tube based lighting, otherwise known as incandescent lights. An incandescent light is just a glowing filament placed inside a vacuum tube. Like the vacuum tubes used in the old 1950s computers, incandescent lights put out tremendous waste heat.

In fact, about 90% of the electricity that powers an incandescent bulb turns into heat. The old vacuum tube computers required constant maintenance to replace vacuum tubes that were always burning out. Likewise, incandescent light bulbs require a fair amount of maintenance compared to LED lighting.

In some ways, fluorescent lighting is an improvement over the incandescent bulb. But it too, is just glass tube technology that uses a gas as its “filament.” It’s just as bulky and fragile as incandescent lighting and puts out more waste heat than LEDs. Why didn’t glass tube based lighting die off like the vacuum tube based computers and electronics? Because glass tube lighting does its job well enough, provided you have plenty of energy to waste.

Today, many business owners are learning first hand about the cost savings in reduced energy use and reduced maintenance requirements of LED lighting. They have chosen to leave the old glass tube, 20th century dinosaur technology behind.

Five Reasons to Use LEDs for Decorative Lighting

Decorative lighting adds visual appeal, style, and professionalism to your business establishment. It differentiates you from your plainer looking competitors. It makes your business look more successful. To make it worth your while, decorative lighting shouldn’t require excessive maintenance, become a fire hazard, or cause big increases to your energy costs. Here are five reasons LED lighting is the best choice:

Energy Efficient

Compared to other technologies such as incandescent and fluorescent lighting, an LED light converts more of its electrical input into light. Incandescent bulbs for example, produce more heat than light. To put out the same amount of illumination as an LED light, the incandescent bulb requires higher wattage. This extra power is wasted as heat. Although your money isn’t going up in smoke, it is going up in heat.

Efficient Color Production

There’s another type of efficiency that LEDs enjoy over incandescent lights. To produce a color, an incandescent light uses a filter, that is, the bulb uses glass with a translucent color such as red, that only allows red light through. The light is dim because most of the bulb’s light doesn’t pass through. This is energy inefficient. On the other hand, a red LED light only produces red light. The power going into the LED directly produces the desired color, such as red.

Safe

Because LEDs produce little heat, they don’t get hot and aren’t fire hazards. You can safely leave them on for hours. They won’t burn the fingers of anyone who handles them.

Versatile

LEDs don’t require a warm-up period. If you want them to blink, they’re perfectly suitable. They’re easily dimmed and amenable to all kinds of control schemes. You can program a controller device to turn them on and off and vary their brightness in very complicated patterns.

Rugged

An LED light is a solid state device. There’s no glass bulbs, tubes, filaments, or glowing gas. It isn’t a collection of separate parts. It’s a solid piece of material. This means it tolerates vibration and shock impacts better than other types of lighting. When using them outdoors, you needn’t worry about wind storms. This saves on maintenance costs. In addition, LED lights outlast other common forms of lighting, which further reduces the cost of maintenance.

Light Without The Heat – Our Cold Storage Lighting Solutions

Cold storage facilities offer a unique energy challenge. The budget costs associated to operate these warehouses using outdated equipment has risen dramatically. The very essence and source of light produces heat and traditional methods for illumination are not energy-efficient or easy to maintain in those conditions. It has been a challenge and cost-prohibitive to the average business owner. Until now.

Technology has made great strides to provide energy-efficient and money-saving improvements to lighting solutions for cold storage. In addition to LED fixtures that now run much cooler than traditional fixtures, they also use over 75% less energy. The load on your overall system is substantially and consistently reduced.

Options are available that allow you to operate the system on a timer to minimize the heat production and lessen the impact on your refrigeration system. This provides savings on both sides of the system. Top notch controls allow you to maintain your facility to run at peak performance.

These improved options also reduce maintenance time and cost. They are designed to last longer with fewer disruptions or down times to change bulbs in often hard to reach places. The bright bulbs offer better working conditions for your employees and improve performance and mood.

We here at Relumination strive to provide our customers with the most innovative and efficient resources for their business. Our years of experience and advanced knowledge have prepared us to offer proven results.

The Power of LED Interior Lighting on Mood

LED interior lighting affects mood in two ways. The first is the psychological effects of its color on people. For example, red stimulates physical arousal. It increases the heart rate, stimulates physical action, and triggers impulse eating. For a fast food restaurant that wants customers to eat quickly to make room for more customers, red is a good color for the interior. However, too much bright red will turn off people. The best solution is using subdued shades of red as accent colors. LED lights work well for adding accent lighting to a restaurant interior. Other color choices have different effects, and choosing the right one depends on your particular type of business establishment.

The second way LED lighting affects mood is that it increases alertness and energy levels in much the same way as sunlight. The reason for this is the color components of LED lighting are nearly identical to sunshine. That’s why its overall white color resembles sunlight. However, it lacks the ultraviolet and infrared (heat) components of sunlight. This is why LED lights are used for treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD). SAD is a seasonal depression that afflicts people living in the northernmost latitudes during the winter, when there is little sunlight. LED light treatment is effective because it makes up for this sunlight deficiency.

Other uses of this effect include:

  • Classroom lighting to enhance student performance. Alertness and energy has a positive effect on mental performance.
  • Office lighting for increasing the productivity of professionals and white-collar workers. LED brightness levels are easily adjusted to accommodate the preferences of individual workers.
  • Lighting for manufacturing floors and warehouses. In addition to enhancing performance, the bright white light reduces accidents and injuries.
  • Rest stop interior lighting. Drowsy driving causes accidents. LED lighting combined with caffeine is highly effective in combating driver fatigue.
  • Store lighting. Happy people are more inclined to make purchases. This is why many stores use background music. LED lighting is yet another mood enhancer. In addition, the pure white light shows off the true colors of food products such as fruits and vegetables.

LED Lighting: Perfect for Business Signage

Many of the properties that make LEDs unique also make them ideal for business signage lighting. This includes signs on the business premises and those placed elsewhere for advertising purposes. Five of these beneficial properties are discussed next.

  • Energy-efficient. While most people are familiar with this benefit, it doesn’t make it any less true. With LED lighting on your advertising signs, you can go ahead and leave them on longer because their energy consumption is so low. LEDs use 60% less power than fluorescent lighting for the same lighting levels.
  • Longer lasting. While fluorescent signage lighting requires replacement several times per year, LEDs will run for years before requiring replacement. The maintenance savings are substantial, especially on large, difficult to access elevated signs such as highway billboards.
  • Rugged. LEDs don’t use fragile glass tubes or filaments inside glass bulbs. They are solid state devices, which means your outdoor signage is less vulnerable to bad weather such as wind storms. This significantly reduces long-term maintenance costs in many parts of the country with highly variable weather.
  • Unidirectional light. Light from LEDs don’t radiate in all directions as does light from fluorescent tubes. LEDs put out unidirectional light that travels in a single direction. This property is useful when lighting a sign with an external light. Often this consists of a light source positioned on the ground and aimed at a sign above. Most of the light emission from the LED light source reaches the sign and therefore isn’t wasted. The fuller white light also shows the sign’s true colors.
  • Low heat output. For indoor signage, this saves on air conditioning in the summer and is less of a fire risk than hot incandescent lighting.

Improve The Patients Experience By Changing Your Hospital Lighting

Patients are changing every day, and as patients change, hospitals have to change too. The costs of care are constantly changing, the role of insurance providers is changing, and there are different options for patients in regards to treatment. These factors and more are causing healthcare facilities to change the way they operate so they can be more competitive.

Lighting once seemed like only a small difference between one medical facility over the other, but it has become a major difference. Yes, lighting can be the difference in a patient choosing one medical facility over the other. In order for your medical facility to compete in the healthcare industry, you have to design your facility around the needs of your patients, visitors, employees, medical providers, etc.

When you invest in better hospital lighting, patients and your hospital staff will see better and feel better. Lighting can also be the key to speeding up the recovery and healing process. Those who are responsible for caring for the patients will be able to do their jobs better because the hospital lighting has been improved.

When your hospital installs proper lighting, patients will be able to relax, your hospital staff will become more productive and efficient at their jobs, and the doctors will be able to do their jobs easier because they will have the improved visibility they need to perform surgery and operate on patients.

In order for you to be a leader in the healthcare industry, your hospital will need to improve a variety of things, especially the ambiance because that can be the key to improving patient experience and the entire reputation of your medical facility.

Tips to Create the Perfect Hotel Lighting

When your guests book a room, you want them to feel comfortable. While comfortable beds, big-screen TVs and nice artwork all provide touches of luxury, you should always pay attention to the room’s lighting.

Make Hotel Lighting Adjustable

Your guests need to function in your hotel room much the way they would at home. Your hotel lighting needs to be bright enough for them to feel comfortable working, reading, or getting ready in the morning. Bright light can easily feel cold and impersonal, so you’ll want to keep the design flexible. Task lighting and accent sconces provide enough light without washing the colors out of the room. A central overhead light by the door and accent lighting near the bed will give your guests the opportunity to adjust the lighting to their needs.

Use Long-Lasting Bulbs

LED bulbs are one of the most sustainable lighting options available. Most bulbs last an average of 50,000 hours, so you’ll spend less time and money replacing burned out bulbs in every hotel room. Furthermore, LEDs are available in a variety of colors, from soft yellow light to bright white. No matter what type of ambience you want to create, there’s a perfect LED bulb for your hotel lighting.

Keep It Simple

Your guests want to operate the lighting in their room with minimal difficulty. This means that you should place light switches and fixtures where they make sense. An overhead light in the entryway with a switch by the door will let your guests instantly see into their room. Reading lamps or sconces with switches located within easy reach from the bed will make relaxing at night much easier.

When creating a design for your hotel lighting, consider what your guests want and what each room needs.

Daylighting and LED Lighting Go Together

Daylighting is the practice of using natural sunlight as much as possible to provide internal building lighting. The intent is to save on electricity for lighting and heating a building. Windows, skylights, and light-colored ceilings work together to allow sunlight into a room and disperse it as evenly as possible.

The windows are either south or north facing to avoid the extreme glare of the rising and setting sun. Reflective surfaces and daylight redirection devices take sunlight beams that would otherwise cause glare, and redirect them to the ceiling where the light is reflected and uniformly spread out in the room.

Because sunlight availability changes throughout the day, daylighting is integrated with artificial lighting so that as the interior natural sunlight increases, the interior artificial lighting dims to keep the overall brightness constant. Likewise, when the sunlight decreases, the artificial lighting brightens. This is accomplished by using light sensors and dimming/brightening controls.

LED lighting works best for daylighting because it puts out a white light that closely resembles sunlight (without the UV light). When the sunlight dims, the LEDs do a good job of preserving the room’s sunlit ambiance. Like natural sunlight, LED lighting acts as a stimulant to the human circadian system. This increases alertness, concentration, and focus, all of which increase worker productivity. The lighting also increases sales in retail environments because colors are more vivid, which enhances the attractiveness of goods and foods.

Finally, LEDs are among the most energy-efficient light sources available, and it only makes sense to use these to maximize the energy savings possible with daylighting. The LEDs are dimmed or even turned off when natural sunlight is sufficient illumination for the room and thus save power. Even when they’re brightened to compensate for dim sunlight, the LEDs consume minimal energy.

Why LEDs Are Ideal for Manufacturing Lighting

Not all manufacturing environments are the same. Some are less forgiving than others. In fact, some are extremely unforgiving. Cement production plants are one example. There are limestone crushing operations, milling machines, and a gigantic hot kiln that rotates. Cement powder is blown through pipes under pressure, and sometimes they leak and spray cement dust into the air. In short, the plants are noisy, full of vibration, hot (in some areas), and sometimes dusty with highly abrasive cement powder. While such an environment can be hard on workers, it’s very hard on the machines themselves.

Good lighting in such a place and in other similarly difficult manufacturing environments is critical to worker productivity and especially to their safety. Unfortunately, old technology lighting such as incandescent and fluorescent lights is innately fragile. Simply put, they are based on a filament or gas encased in a glass bulb or tube. Yes, you can place them out of “harm’s way” such as on high ceilings, but they’re not out of the reach of the intense vibration of these plants, which penetrate the walls and ceilings.

In the case of incandescent lights, most of the electricity they consume turns into heat, which makes an uncomfortable environment even more uncomfortable. In addition, these aren’t the best lights from a worker safety standpoint because they are relatively dim for the energy consumed.

If you’re the plant manager of such a facility, doesn’t it make sense to install rugged lighting that can take the heat, vibration, and other abuses? LED lighting is innately rugged because it’s solid state. It’s essentially a solid diode that emits light. There’s no glass bulbs, shells, or other fragile components. Another benefit is they last substantially longer than other types of lighting.

Unlike incandescent bulbs, LED lights aren’t primarily heat-producing devices that put out a little bit of light. Most of the electricity they consume produces light. This means you have a brightly lit facility that consumes less power for its lighting. It means a safer environment for your hard-working employees.

There are many types of LED lights. Not only can you place them high overhead, you can place smaller lights on the machines or even in the machines. Solid state LEDs resist vibration. Less heat production makes them more desirable from a fire hazard point of view.