Cities like Milan and Turin are expecting at least 50 percent less electricity consumption thanks to recent transformations to LED and Optotronic control devices from Osram. However, lightning strikes can risk the economic advantages as LED modules run with lower voltage levels and could be damaged from overvoltage. This danger has increased with the UN Climate Council identifying increasing levels of lightning worldwide in its fifth assessment report (IPCC14). Around 10 percent of the several million lightning strikes occurring each day impact on the ground, thereby causing voltage peaks. To effectively protect LED modules assembled in road luminaires, the Osram Optotronic 4DIM features overvoltage protection of 8 kilovolts as standard.
Levels of lightning density in Europe are high in summer, particularly in July and August, and with large regional differences – the U.K. Meteorological Office recorded between just 0.25 and over 20 strikes per square kilometre in 2014. In general it can also be said about distribution across Europe that lightning in the South East occurs more frequently than in the North or North West, and in towns and cities more than in rural areas
As a consequence, the new generation of Osram “Optotronic 4DIM” electronic control units feature protection of up to 8 kilovolts between mains supply and ground in protection classes I and II. This means that lightning can strike an area of up to 200 metres from a luminaire mast without the LED module being damaged.
Compared to the common 4 kilovolt overvoltage protection with control units of other manufacturers, this means that with an example mast spacing of 30 metres, twice the quantity of road luminaires survive lightning impacts without damage. In many European regions the high level of overvoltage protection with Optotronic 4DIM units is usually sufficient to provide long term protection. However in regions with high lightning density levels though, it is recommended as a precaution to implement supplementary protective measures, for example in the main distribution frames and junction boxes of road lighting systems.
Osram as the first manufacturer made this 8 kilovolt protection possible with a so-called EQUI connection (equipotential) for protection class II applications, enabling various components of the lighting system to exhibit the same electric potential, thus significantly reducing the occurrence of overvoltage on the LED module.
Optotronic control units also reliably protected from voltage peaks from two other hazardous sources: – those with up to 6 kilovolts due to load changes or switching commands in the power supply grid (often generated several dozens of times per year), and from electrostatic discharge (ESD) occurring with for example maintenance work, if no ESD protective measures exist.
Overvoltage though does not automatically mean the immediate failure of an LED module, but can cause premature ageing and therefore shorter operating periods; this has consequences for the operator in terms of costs. Normally, LED solutions have low failure rates and achieve up to 100,000 operating hours.
Lux Reports…The principal legislative requirements for hospitality and leisure facilities in the UK lie in the relevant Building Regulations. These are now separated out between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and while there are some core elements, each has its own nuances so make sure you have the right guidance document for where your building is.
For lighting, the main crux is the part dealing with conservation of fuel and power. In a nutshell, it’s energy efficiency. Hospitality has always been a bit of a grey area where the building regulations are concerned as it includes ‘general areas’ as well as ‘display lighting’, which has much less stringent efficacy demands. The third section is for ‘office, industrial and storage’ where luminaire performance instead of lamp efficacy, is the driver, with additional facility to bring in lighting controls.
The Building Regs, the HSE’s guide to lighting at work and theEsos regulations. Pay attention, we’ll be asking questions later
If you’re feeling lazy, it would be easy to convince yourself that all hospitality lighting is display lighting, but the guidance is quite clear that display lighting should be on separate controls to facilitate it being switched off when ‘people are not inspecting exhibits, merchandise or being entertained’. This effectively precludes the widespread use of inefficient sources, even in restaurants as more efficient lighting must be provided during cleaning, setting-up times etc. It is also worth noting that any task which is predominantly desk-based falls into the office category so reception areas will almost inevitably fall into this category.
The legislation governing the quantity of light is pretty much restricted to that published by the Health and Safety Executive, and its guide on lighting at work. As might be expected, it really only deals with the health and safety aspects of lighting for people in the workplace, rather than the creation of pleasant or appropriate lighting environments. It says it’s important that lighting in the workplace:
allows people to notice hazards and assess risks;
is suitable for the environment and the type of work (for example, it is not located against surfaces or materials that may be flammable);
provides sufficient light (illuminance on the task);
allows people to see properly and discriminate between colours, to promote safety;
does not cause glare, flicker or stroboscopic effects;
avoids the effects of veiling reflections;
does not result in excessive differences in illuminance within an area or between adjacent areas;
is suitable to meet the special needs of individuals;
does not pose a health and safety risk itself;
is suitably positioned so that it may be properly maintained or replaced, and disposed of to ensure safety;
includes, when necessary, suitable and safe emergency lighting.
The guide also gives recommended illuminance levels, although these are only split into five categories dependent on risk and level of detail with average illuminances ranging from 20 lx for circulation to 500 lx in drawing offices. It also gives minimum levels deemed acceptable. Given the limited scope of the categories, it is better to obtain more detailed guidance.
Guidance
The Society of Light and Lighting (SLL) publishes a raft of lighting guidance which reflects the relevant European standards. This covers not just the recommended illuminance levels for the tasks involved, but also application guidance.
The SLL’s Guide to the Lighting of Licensed Premises differs from many of their technical guidance as it is aimed primarily at the manager of the premises – a non-expert. By contrast, the ‘Code for Lighting’ is highly technical and probably more suited to larger chains of premises with lighting specialists or facilities managers within the staff. Having said that, the licensed premises guide does tackle design considerations such as distinguishing the bar back from drinking or eating areas as well as detailed guidance on surface colours as well as key factors such as colour rendering and selection of suitable lamp types for different areas within the building and the principles in the guide can be applied in many different types of hospitality and leisure facilities.
Many people will have experienced poor lighting in restaurants and bars and the key remains to consider the users of the space. Creating a moody, subdued lit environment is not much help if you can’t read a menu. The SLL guidance always puts the users at the heart of its design guidance and the licensed premises guide is a useful starting point.
Esos
Much of the regulation and guidance for hospitality and leisure facilities covers the individual buildings. But companies comprising a large number of facilities, such as hotel or restaurant chains, must also comply with the new Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme, or Esos.
Esos will require large companies to conduct a full energy audit by the end of 2015 – and repeat it every four years.
The definition of a large undertaking is a company or organisation with 250 employees or with a turnover in excess of €50m (£38m, $57m); this includes all organisations – including not-for-profit ones – that are part of a corporate group that includes a large undertaking. If a company qualifies for Esos and is not fully covered by ISO 50001 they will need to carry out an Esos assessment.
Esos itself goes much further than purely the building premises; industrial processes and transport are also part of the assessment so companies with fleets of company cars or transportation lorries are going to have to assess each vehicle.
The deadline for submission of the Esos assessment is 5 December 2015.
Emergency lighting
To comply with the Fire Safety Order, you need to have emergency lighting and look after it properly. Facility managers or owners are required by law to test their emergency lighting once a month. The fines can be in the thousands for people who can’t provide a monthly test record, and the responsible person can end up with a hefty fine or even a prison sentence if someone ends up getting hurt as a result. Turn to page 60 for more on how to stay out of trouble on this one.
Foibles
When is industrial not industrial? Well, in pretty much every chic hip eatery or drinkery in every major city in the UK. The prevalence of squirrel cage-style filament lamp dominates the interior design scene of just about anywhere that sells pulled pork these days. Now, these filament lamps clearly don’t meet any of the requirements of the Building Regulations and fall into the inefficient sources that were banned years ago. So how have they survived the cull? Simply because they are sold as non-domestic, ‘rough service’ lamps for use in industrial areas such as factories and building sites where they might get knocked about.
Retro-style exposed filament lamps and luminaires are big business. But it’s a fine line as to whether you could actually specify them if you reconsider the Building Regulations. Urban chic is all well and good, but there’s more choice than the ubiquitous squirrel, believe me.
Call us today to begin your hotel LED lighting retrofit. Tel: 0208-540-8287. Email: sales@novelenergylighting.com
Afterglow: This tone from a halogen lamp could soon fade into history if the EC sticks with its 2016 ban on one of the last vestiges of the incandescent business – halogens.
LUX Reports: Neonlite director Fred Bass argues against the industry’s case to keep energy guzzling halogens alive, calling such a move ‘nonsensical.’
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Sometime in the next few weeks, the European Commission is expected to vote on whether to delay a ban on halogen lamps. Halogens are the last real bastion of incandescent technology. They are a thriving holdover of conventional filament burning bulbs – superior in many ways to standard filament lamps because they are treated with a halogen gas, improving their colour temperature and their efficiency.
Although the industry has long promoted them for their so-called ‘eco’ benefits, they are only slightly more efficient than the conventional filament bulbs that the EC has already widely banished. They are terribly inefficient compared to modern LED (light-emitting diode) and CFL (compact fluorescent) bulbs. Thus, halogens are carbon culprits. That’s why the EC in 2009 scheduled them for a September 2016 retirement.
The conventional lighting industry, represented by the Brussels-based trade body LightingEurope, is now campaigning for a stay of halogen’s execution. It wants to push the halogen ban out by another four years – to 2020, nearly six years from now. It seems stuck between a rock and hard place: While it tries itself to steer consumers toward an LED future, it claims that quality, performance and price of LEDs will not be ready to meet mass consumer demand until 2020. Europeans today are buying more halogens than anything – more even than CFLs it notes, warning of a bulb shortage if the ban takes hold. As good as LEDs are, they just aren’t ready yet to provide the same quality of light as halogen at an affordable price, nor will they be by 2016, LightingEurope claims. It notes that LEDs lamps are still too different from conventional lamps in appearance, price and quality, and that this difference is confusing consumers.
‘Nonsense,’ say LightingEurope’s critics. LEDs have arrived, are more than ready for prime time, and the sooner the better from an environmental perspective. The conventional industry has had already had half a dozen years to prepare for the ban, which, ironically, it lobbied for itself in the first place. If the big traditional lighting companies like Philips, Osram and GE can’t meet LED demand, then the newfangled companies born in the CFL and LED era can – companies such as Aurora, Neonlite, TCP, LIFX, Opple, Cree, Acuity – they note. Some suggest that the big companies are simply trying to hold onto their old ‘replacement bulb’ business model for as long as possible while they make the difficult transition to LEDs, which vendors say last for 20 years.
Lux recently spoke at length with two leading voices on opposite sides of the issue: Diederik de Stoppelaar, secretary general of LightingEurope, and Fred Bass, a director of Hong Kong-based Neonlite and managing director of its UK-based Neonlite International group, which includes the Megaman brand of LED lamps. Neonlite has no incandescent legacy. It started life some 20 years ago as a CFL company, and today about 90 percent of its business is in LEDs. Bass firmly opposes any delay to the halogen ban.
Bass (pictured, right) and de Stoppelaar are not completely at odds. They agree that the industry must weed out inferior LED products that are tarnishing the technology’s reputation. They also implore the industry to clear up the confusion surrounding the relative merits of the different lamp technologies – confusion that the industry itself fosters through loose, or at least non-uniform, performance claims via packaging and merchandising.
But they couldn’t be further apart on the subject of the ban. In a two-part series, we bring you an edited version of our questions and answers with de Stoppelaar and Bass. Yesterday, de Stoppelaar made the case for delaying the ban until 2020. Today, Bass lays out why the EC should stick to its guns and just get on with the ban as planned:
Lux: The halogen ban is set for 2016, the EC is voting on pushing it back to 2018, and LightingEurope says that’s not even long enough of an extension. They want 2020. What’s your take on all of this?
Bass: I’m very much on the side of no delay at all. You’ve got to understand Megaman’s position. We’ve been making low energy lamps since we started 20 years back. We have no legacy in high energy lamps. We just have low energy. (Almost) all of our business is in LED. So to be fair my perspective is just go for the ban because obviously it suits my business. But taking that apart, if you just look a the bigger picture, the environmental picture and all athe rest of it, to me it makes no sense to delay when LED technology has moved at such a pace compared to all the market predictions. The price is half of what it was expected to be at this stage and it’s going to keep going at that pace. To consider pushing out the ban, it’s just nonsensical.
Right, but…
It would be less credible if they moved the dates. It was such a landmark decision. Then to sort of say ‘oh well the industry doesn’t really like it, we’re going to push the dates out,’ then I think the directives will lose their credibility. So you have the credibility issue, the energy issue, and you have technology that is moving at a much faster pace than was ever predicted. And you have LightingEurope saying we don’t want it to change until 2020. It’s very very strange to me. The consumer is only going to gain by switching to the new technology.
Is there any argument at all for delaying?
If there is a need to change a date you shouldn’t make big changes like 4 years, you should make modest changes, 1 year perhaps. I’m not in favour of any movement at all. I can accept that in some parts of Eastern Europe maybe, the standard of living, market pricing may make the lamps less affordable. I also accept that some of the lamp technology hasn’t got a direct LED replacement, so maybe there could be a case to say that certain types of lamps can be delayed but the vast majority of the common GLS type, A-lamp type products are available, they’re at the right price and to a standard which is good enough for the domestic market. It may not be a 50,000-hour lamp, but 15,000 hours is already good enough for 10 years use or whatever. I can’t understand why you’d push it back.
But then, as you said, you don’t have the legacy business to worry about, the way many of LightingEurope’s members do.
They have a different perspective. They’re not like Megaman without the legacy in halogen. These are big companies with lots of production in these areas. And clearly there must be a conflict of interest when they offer a view on the situation. On the one hand they want to see progress and environmental improvement and on the other hand they’ve got a vested interest in these older technologies as well. It’s not easy for them to manage the situation. But I can’t agree with their position.
Yes, it’s almost bizarre. The industry has been telling the world to move to LEDs for several years, and now their message is that LEDs aren’t ready.
It doesn’t ring true. LightingEurope was taking a a leading role in establishing legislation with Brussels getting the directive in place. They had lots of input. And for them to turn around now and say ‘we want to push it out four years,’ even though we see all the market indications moving faster than we anticipated, I have a problem with that. I suppose in principle we can leave the ban in place for the vast majority of lamps, and maybe there’s some compromise on some smaller issues where the technology isn’t quite ready on certain types or whatever. But I don’t see any need to change it on the mass market.
Are they just holding on to the vestiges of the good old business model of selling replacement lamps, and trying to extend that for as long as possible until they figure out how to make money from long lasting LEDs?
There’s probably something in that. There’s a massive price range in the market. That means margins on LEDs are now very very slim. And there’s an awful lot of new players in the market in LED. It’s fragmenting. If you look at that dynamic for the big players, their predictions on profit on LED will be quite different from what they were a few years ago. So in as much as we see a huge drop in the price of LEDs, that will hit clearly hit the potential profits of big manufacturers clearly. And there’s a lot of new players on the market, so I think market share of the large companies is an issue. If a huge volume of LEDs is required in two years time, I think the market can supply it, but maybe it’s not them.
So there’s not really an overall manufacturing capacity issue that will lead to the bulb shortage that LightingEurope is warning about?
From a Megaman perspective it’s an opportunity. Why isn’t it an opportunity for them as well? It’s odd. There’s going to be a very different model going forward. Five years down the line, whatever state the ban’s in, everybody will be using the longer lasting LED technology and therefore there won’t be the same replacement market. The dynamics of the whole lighting industry are changing. Everybody accepts that and we’re planning for it. We all understand that the traditional incandescent retrofit business is finished. Whether it finishes in 2016 or finishes in 2020, it’s finished.
A lot of LightingEurope jobs are in Europe. Closing down halogen lines could mean costly and politically difficult layoffs.
True. And there again there’s another conflict of interest. From a European perspective one tends to be very mindful of any threat to the loss of European jobs. That will be another factor in their argument. I still don’t think it’s sufficient to delay.
Although your company doesn’t have the legacy burden, it’s a tough business for any company new or old. Nobody’s future is guaranteed.
No. There are lots of new players in the market. It’s a very volatile situation. I’ve been in the business a long time. It’s the most exciting time I’ve ever had in the industry. When I started in the industry, we were using technologies that were 100 years old. Now nothing’s for sure.
So where will the money come from in the future?
It will be a combination of things. The retrofits will be very strong for I guess the next five years. But there will be an increasing amount of integrated fixtures business. The estimates are that in new builds, in five years time, half of the fittings will be LED. So we have to be in integrated fixtures as well as retrofits. And we have to be in other areas like smart controls. We don’t know how big that will be but we think it’s a very significant development; it adds considerably to energy savings. The Megaman philosophy is not to get into complex building management system, but to find solutions that can be fitted almost like a retrofit. Wireless systems and so on mean we have a ready market without rewiring a building.
What about the problem that LightingEurope secretary general Diederik de Stoppelaar mentioned – that there are non-brand names selling substandard lights at very low prices, tarnishing the reputation of the LED industry?
That’s one area where actually I agree with him. There’s a lot of new players. Market surveillance in Europe is a key issue that we’ve been going on about for many years – LightingEurope and ourselves. So I would agree, but I don’t see that that has anything to do with the delay in the ban. There is an issue with keeping out the rubbish but that is not I my mind any excuse for a delay. It’s nonsensical: ‘We’ve got rubbish in the market, we must delay the ban.’ What’s that got to do with anything? It’s a separate issue.
I think you also might agree with LightingEurope’s point that the industry needs clear, consistent marketing and merchandising in which the consumer can understand and trust the information on packaging, signage and so forth.
(Yes). I walk into a retail shop and I’m totally confused by the whole display in the lighting area. I’m a lighting guy for 35 years and I’m totally confused by the way it’s presented, the way it’s sold to the public. There’s an environmental organisation in Brussels, ECOS (European Environmental Citizens’ Organisation for Standardisation) where one guy, Edouard Toulouse is really big on this.He wants to change the whole way this thing is sold to the public. And I’m totally with him. It’s so confusing. Waht does the normal guy do when he walks in the store? What does he buy? It’s impossible. Lamp packaging and display is a mess. The industry knows it. The authorities know it. But it has nothing to do with whether you should ban the product or not.
Bad food. Bad service. And now it’s official: Bad lighting can ruin a restaurant’s business.
Nearly a third of Brits have walked out of a pub or eatery because the illumination turned them off, according to a June survey by utility npower.
The trade publication BigHospitality reported that 17 percent of the 1,500 respondents beat a retreat because the lighting was too bright, while 12 percent bolted for the opposite reason – the lights were too dim .
‘We can probably all think of an occasion that has been spoiled by a restaurant or bar not getting the ambience right and lighting is a crucial part of that,’ said npower’s head of customer service for small business, Rachel Vincent. ‘Our research shows how damaging bad lighting can be to the success of a business. For this reason, business owners need to think about more than just their menus or location. Ambience is vital to securing new customers and getting old ones to return.’
The survey also showed that lighting mattered more than price to 66 percent of the respondents when picking a venue for a date, and that it outweighed music to 53 percent of them. A whopping 88 percent said that the lighting in general would affect how much they enjoy a date or a romantic meal.
BigHospitality advised restaurants to vary the lighting across sections in order to appeal to different ideas of ambience. It also noted that different lighitng matches well with different foods.
‘For example, light bar food goes with soft lighting while sushi looks better in a brigther light,’ it said.
LUX magazine reports that like most people in the lighting business, I’m often asked by acquaintances for advice. Usually, my friend’s building project has come to a crucial stage. I receive an email with the subject line ‘Urgent lighting advice’, links to the John Lewis website and the comment, ‘What do you think of these???’
Needless to say, at this stage no one wants to hear me spouting off about design concepts or reinterpretations of the architecture. They want me to endorse their tasteful choice of luminaires from John bloody Lewis. My brother and his wife once proudly showed me their £4,000 installation of Chinese LED downlights which put splodgy pools of light on the carpet and nowhere else. ‘Very contemporary,’ I said.
No one, as far as I know, has ever acted on my advice. So I thought I’d compile a list of some general principles of lighting for my acquaintances to ignore. These are not all mine; most are accepted orthodoxies. And they’re general principles – for each a professional could come up with a further list of caveats and addendums. But if you follow them, I believe you’ll create a far better scheme than the average. And if it stops someone spending £4,000 on downlights, I’ll have done my job.
1 Use a professional lighting consultant if the budget permits.
2 Think first about the lighting you want to achieve rather than the technology.
3 Maximise daylight if you can.
4 Light for the people who’ll use the space and their tasks.
5 Invest in the interior: the secret of good lighting is having good stuff to light.
6 Layer the light: ambient, then accent and task.
7 Light the walls rather than the floor.
8 Light the ceiling rather than the floor.
9 Don’t be afraid of darkness (at least pools of relative darkness).
10 Never ‘floodlight’ a building – you’ll flatten it.
11 For exteriors, pick out architectural details unseen in the day.
12 Be brave enough to use colour in any scheme, but only as an element.
13 Don’t obsess about uniformity; it’s overrated.
14 Follow the codes and regs, but they’re no substitute for common sense.
15 The most efficient light is the one you’re not using – use design to reduce energy use.
16 It’s better to use lots of low-output lights rather than a few higher-powered ones.
17 Conceal or integrate the majority of light sources.
18 For groups of pendants or wall lights, use odd numbers of fittings such as three, five or seven to achieve the ‘harmony of repetition’. It works!
19 It’s better to use pendants decoratively rather than as the workhorses of a scheme.
20 Consider control at the outset – different tasks and times of day need different light levels and even colour temperatures.
21 If the controls aren’t simple to use, they won’t be used. Give users four labelled buttons (‘meeting’, ‘presentations’, ‘lunch’, for example, and an ‘off’).
22 Don’t assume compatibility between lamps, drivers and dimming controllers: test them.
23 Buy lamps (and even LED luminaires) in batches to ensure they match in colour and output.
24 Don’t assume a high CRI number will ensure good colour rendering (it doesn’t include strong reds, for instance). Find out the product’s R9 value.
25 Buy from reputable manufacturers – otherwise it’s a false economy.
26 Don’t be missold by optimistic maintenance factors. You don’t want a dim space in three
years’ time.
27 Know what warranty you’re getting by reading the small print. Better still, write your own.
28 Futureproof your project: Make sure you can replace failed lights with matching kit.
29 If there’s no maintenance plan, assume the scheme won’t be maintained.
30 Finally, if you can’t find all the numbers you need on a spec sheet, don’t buy the product.
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Retail lighting has come a long way in the last couple of years: LED payback time has shortened and expectations have risen, but end users still have to check for dodgy specs. Kathrine Anker reports:
Every time Lux brings together manufacturers, designers and end users to discuss retail lighting, things have changed dramatically since the last time. It’s not long ago that LED was a prohibitively expensive technology for some, and not good enough for others, but things have moved on pretty far since then.
Our latest retail lighting forum, in association with Microlights, got off to an optimistic start, acknowledging that a lot of education has happened. ‘I think all clients have become discerning,’ said Theo Paradise-Hirst, head of lighting design at NDYLight. ‘They’ve realised that lighting is the absolute key driver to making retail work. There is more knowledge and appreciation of colour rendering and you can have conversations with clients that you’d never have had 10 years ago about the exact colour temperature and materials.’
Adding to the optimism was a consensus that payback time for LED lighting has come down to a level that will please most finance directors. Leases can be short in retail, so a quick return on investment is more important than it is in other sectors. Three to five years appeared to be the accepted threshold for most end users around the table, including those responsible for lighting in Sainsbury’s, Harrods and John Lewis, and they all agreed that we are getting there.
From the suppliers’ perspective, the maturity of the UK lighting market is to blame for the slow climb toward the tipping point. ‘Retailers in the UK have been very switched on for a long time and market prices for conventional technology are very low,’ said John Chamberlin, sales director at Microlights. ‘Because the price point is so low in the traditional lighting market and you’re starting from a very low price point, it’s taken this long for LED solutions to pay back. But that tipping point is gone now – we’re getting under two-year paybacks in some cases.’
Hitting the tipping point where cost is no longer prohibitive means some end users can start to think about using LED luminaires not just as a secondary light source but as the main one, said lighting designer Keith Ware: ‘We’re starting to see more use of LED as the primary light. For the first time, it feels like LED is actually a credible technology, that we can start to talk to our clients about full LED schemes. Retailers are willing to go with it because they are starting to look at the whole life cycle and the payback.’Tipping point aside, payback time still depends on what you’re replacing. Alan Patton, M&E manager at B&Q, said: ‘If you’re replacing T5, they are very good already so the payback time of a retrofit will be five to seven years. You can still get your energy consumption down by switching from T5 to LED, but it’s at a cost.’
Horses for courses
Despite the LED hype, retail estates are still predominantly lit by fluorescent T8 – LEDs make up less than five per cent of fittings in retail stores, according to a recent survey conducted by BRE. And ultimately, as Phil Caton, director of PJC Light Studio, pointed out, the best system is the one that delivers. ‘If you’ve got a high ceiling you’ll struggle to get the same punch from an LED fitting as you’ll get from a metal halide, unless you significantly increase the size of the fitting – and nobody wants to see big, clunky fittings in high-end retail stores,’ Caton said.
He added: ‘We get the feedback that LED doesn’t give the same depth – the quality of light is much flatter, even when you play with contrast ratios. When there are multiple LED sources in a fitting we have the problem of fringing and shadows around the product, and dimming still gives problems with modulations, so LED won’t be the total solution for the foreseeable future.’
Theo Paradise-Hirst added: ‘Over time some LEDs don’t render colours as well. It’s not just the output, sometimes you have to be aware that there might be colour changes. If you go to galleries that are lit with LED, they look great on day one but after a while something
MANAGING PERCEPTIONS
Light levels can get shamefully high in retail and it often falls to designers to argue for a more restrained approach. ‘Competing shops in a beauty hall don’t look at the relative brightness in the room, they just want to have the brightest shop. So light levels go up and up, completely unnecessarily and the products end up looking all bleached out,’ said Maida Hot, managing director of lighting design company GIA Equation. ‘Trying to find a balance that creates a luxurious feel is quite a challenge. Everyone puts in more, just in case.’
Most of the designers taking part in our retail lighting forum had encountered clients with excessive and unnecessary light level demands. ‘It’s all about perception,’ said Keith Ware. ‘When a client says ‘I want 1,000 lx’, that’s not a lighting brief – that’s just a statement. You need to ask, what is the lit effect you’re trying to create?’ Ware told the roundtable that his company, Dalziel and Pow, successfully convinced Primark to bring down the light level in its shops to below 1,000 lx. ‘We arranged a test with a lighting consultant to prove to Primark that they didn’t need 1,500 lx everywhere. You could bring the level down to 800-900 as a general average – of course with higher contrast on the walls and better vertical on the fixtures off the aisles. But we cheated a little bit – when we did the test we reduced the light to the level we wanted before the test started. When they arrived they said: “This level is great, now we need to reduce it.” That nailed it completely, because it made them realise that there are better ways of designing a lighting scheme to a lower lux level if you get the contrast right.’
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The new Philips MasterLED GLS Bulbs 13W = 75W, and 20W = 100W have now arrived into stock. These bulbs offer amazing light output with corresponding energy savings. The flagship 20W bulb is equivalent to a 100W standard incandescent GLS, and is the highest output LED GLS on the market.
We have a limited time special offer on these two bulbs (available with either E27 Screw, or B22 Bayonet bases) – click on the links below.
Bass (pictured, right) and de Stoppelaar are not completely at odds. They agree that the industry must weed out inferior LED products that are tarnishing the technology’s reputation. They also implore the industry to clear up the confusion surrounding the relative merits of the different lamp technologies – confusion that the industry itself fosters through loose, or at least non-uniform, performance claims via packaging and merchandising.
