Professor Wilkins says it’s ‘plain enough’ that bad flicker from magnetic ballasts in schools can impair learning. A switch to high frequency gear, or LED luminaires, would fix the problem.

Four fifths of British school children are having their learning impaired and are at risk from anxiety, migraines, headaches and even dyslexia from flickering lighting, an expert scientist has warned.

Because of the way magnetic ballasts manipulate the 50 Hz sinusoidal waveform of the input voltage, they deliver a light output that flickers at 100 Hz. This frequency is in the danger zone of harmful flicker, which could impair learning.

Arnold Wilkins, emeritus professor at the University of Essex and a leading expert in photosensitivity and physiology, says distracting flicker in the UK’s schools needs to be addressed.

‘Unfortunately 80 per cent of our schools are still lit with lighting that flickers at 100 hertz’, he told a Lux conference on lighting fixture design in London this month. ‘It causes headaches and its causes anxiety. It’s there all the time. Whether it impairs their learning, seems to me to be plain enough.’

Although people can only directly perceive fluctuations at frequencies up to about 70 Hz, human vision is adversely affected by light fluctuations up to 200 Hz. Visual performance is especially degraded by flicker in the 100 Hz to 200 Hz range and in general, younger people are likely to perceive lower level and higher frequency flicker than older observers.

Professor Arnold Wilkins says that 100 Hz is present all the time under magnetic ballasted fluorescent fittings in schools. ‘Whether it impairs their learning, seems to me to be plain enough’ he told the Lighting Fixture Design Conference in London.

‘There’s a huge range of susceptibility in the population with those [who get] migraines at one extreme. And it probably contributes to dyslexia but we don’t know for certain.

‘100 hertz should be avoided.’ The solution is to upgrade to high frequency control gear for fluorescent or LED. ‘It’s a simple as that.’

Flicker at 100 Hz is prevalent in older fluorescent light fittings with magnetic ballasts which were popularly installed in schools before the introduction of high-frequency electronic control gear and LED panels. Typically, magnetically ballasted fluorescent luminaires will exhibit flicker of between 10 and 20 per cent of output, and a ‘compact flicker degree’, or CFD, of over 20 per cent.  Prolonged exposure leads to eyestrain, headaches and anxiety.

Professor Wilkins has a number of high profile awards to his name, including the Leon Gaster Memorial Award, the Walsh Weston Memorial Award and the Owen Aves Medal and has been made a honorary fellow of the College of Optometry.

LED Ceiling panels are available from Novel Energy Lighting. We stock multiple quality brands, such as Thorn, Ansell, Philips, and MEGE:

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The concrete cold-war era Hardened Aircraft Shelters (HAS) under which the RAF’s Typhoon fighters are stored received a thoughtful LED make-over.

Senior project manager at the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Jim Ellistone, in the high visibility jacket , helped to deliver  a project that was both efficient  and sustainable.

Despite facing severe budget restraints, a project has been delivered that is both energy efficient and sustainable and the RAF’s decision to use LED lighting, for one of first times on a new project, played an important role.

The building has been so well received within the defence community that it has been awarded the Ministry of Defence’s prestigious Sanctuary Award for Sustainability.

RAF Lossiemouth often bears the brunt of the West’s increasingly fractious relationship with Russia, with RAF Typhoon fighters being dispatched from the base on a regular basis to intercept Russian aircraft, which often play cat and mouse with Britain’s air defences. This means the base is constantly in use.

Sustainability was put at the heart of the project and energy efficiency was key. The new building and the refurbishment of the older buildings also had to be completed in a robust fashion, so as to ensure long, low-cost use.

In order achieve these aims, LED was quickly considered and pitched.

‘There were a number compelling reasons to change the lighting in the older facilities, principally because the buildings involved are used by the squadron 24 hours a day. But like any project that involves spending public money, it had to be justified,’ commented senior project manager at the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, Jim Ellistone , who worked on the project.

The new building would have a number of uses, requiring different levels of lighting. Besides the executive and administrative offices, the new headquarters building would provide a state of the art secure facility that would be used to plan and brief complex flying operations.

The building would also accommodates the Squadron’s engineering and logistics facilities and the Survival Equipment Section, which maintains all of the high tech equipment worn by Typhoon pilots during flight.

‘Everyone involved in the process quickly recognised the benefits of new lighting, the figures showed that, due to energy savings, the project would pay for itself in just over four years,’ Ellistone added.

In defence projects, the cheapest capital option is often used, due to the budget constraints that the MoD is placed under by the government of the day, however the benefits of LED were quickly provable to authorities.

‘This was an easy change to sell and was, in many ways, like pushing on an open door. The benefits of LED are now well established and we knew that a case for the technology had to be put forward at the first planning stage,’ Ellistone commented.

The highly intricate work that RAF engineers have to carry out on the Typhoon fighters, which are some of the RAF’s newest and most agile aircraft, means that excellent light quality is required. Such is the 24-hour nature of the base, repairs could be needed any time during the the day and night.

The aircraft are stored under concrete Cold War era Hardened Aircraft Shelters (HAS), which had not been internally upgraded since the days of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Energy efficient LEDs, offering the necessary light levels were installed as replacements to older models. LEDs were also used in the lines on the base’s concrete floor, which the aircraft use as guidance when they pull forward.

‘We had to be careful when specifying fixtures for the HAS, when the jet engines run in the hangers, fumes come from the wings and rise upwards,’ Ellistone said of the work.  ‘We had to make sure, in these circumstances that the lights did not melt.’

The main squadron headquarters were delivered a month early, with a saving on the original tender target price of more than £1 million.

In reviewing the project on completion, the Combined Project Delivery Team came to the conclusion that a ‘real and deep sustainability gain’ was made by ‘stepping back’ to look at the fundamentals of what they were being asked to do.

This project is an example of reasoned arguments being used to build up a case for change and then, in timely fashion,  a sustainable solution being agreed and delivered on time and within budget.

Visit www.novelenergylighting.com to explore our range of office and warehouse LED lighting, or call us today: 0208-540-8287

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Scientist who discovered human centric lighting shares tips with Lux. PLUS: Lighting based indoor positioning set to revolutionise US stores. AND: Health fears makes city think twice about LED. Lux Today 24 January 2017

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Critics of the lit environment in the nation’s commercial workplaces say the sector lacks creativity

A THIRD of Britain’s office workers hate their lighting, a study by the respected pollsters Ipsos has discovered.

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Lighting can do a lot to assist partially sighted people.

1. Use colour to highlight differences between objects and surfaces, making it easier to negotiate a complex space. For example, in a white-tiled bathroom have the bathroom furniture in a different colour.
2. Use different colours to highlight circulation routes from functional space (retail spaces, open-plan offices etc).
3. Paint door frames a different colour to the doors and walls.
4. Consider a different colour for door handles.
5.  Ensure that railings on stairs are a different colour to the walls, likewise the banisters.
6.  It is important to be able to pick out the edge of steps so use a contrasting strip or nosing.
7. Glass doors and windows need to be visible, so consider the use of brightly coloured designs where vertical glazing is accessible to passers-by.

1. Increase light levels in areas such as stairs and level changes in areas like the kitchen and the bathrooms. There may be an aesthetic challenge in achieving this, but new low-energy LED sources can deliver high light levels from relatively small fixtures.
2. Introduce additional light fixtures in areas where spatial definition is important.
3. Make sure that light is in the places where it needs to be. Use the efficiency of localised lighting to assist in visual tasks, especially in places like kitchens and at work stations.
4. Make the best use of natural light, but be aware of the potential problems that an over-bright blind can cause by ‘bleaching’ the rest of the surroundings.
5. Make sure that any exterior lighting acts as a ‘way-marker’ as well as providing illumination. A line of light points can be more helpful than an illuminated pathway.
6. Use light as a defining element in areas of the building where there are objects or furniture that protrude into circulation routes.
7. Consider the impact of emergency lighting should the normal electrical supply fail. Escape lighting should assist in finding the route to safety for everyone.

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Elephants are causing serious headaches for farmers in India.

Elephants have now started coming out of the forest throughout the year instead of only during harvest seasons.

LED lighting is being inventively utilised in East India to prevent rampaging elephants from trampling farmer’s crops.

Hopefully the lights will be popular with farmers so that they can sleep peacefully instead of chasing elephants all night.

Biswajit Mohanty – The Wildlife Protection Society of India

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Tunable-white lighting is one of the biggest trends in commercial lighting. LED developers have taken a serious grip on the photo-biological research being produced by university departments and other groups. We know more about the way that humans function than ever before and you might say that it’s fortunate for the LED community that the science appears to support a practical technology that is perfectly suited to LED exploitation.

Tunable whites use colour mixing

Standard LED colour-mixing uses red, green and blue channels that are adjusted to deliver the entire range of the colour spectrum. Tunable-whites work in the similar way, using of a number of controllable channels to adjust the colour temperature of the luminaire’s white light output. The channels in a tunable-white system all produce white light, but with varying colour temperatures, from a warm tone to a cool tone.

Inevitably, there are levels of sophistication involved in tunable-white systems and it’s vital that the specifier understands not only what is required from the lighting, but also what any particular system is capable of delivering.

Simple systems use two lines of LEDs

Take a warm white LED and sit it next to a cool white LED and cross-dim between the two. Job done? Well, not quite. It’s true that the cheapest tunable whites work in exactly this way. The most basic tunable linear systems use LED strips mounted side-by-side. One channel will be close to 2700K in colour temperature, with the other up around a cool 6000K. The LED strips are mounted inside an aluminium extrusion fitted with an opal diffuser, which does the colour mixing as the light passes through it. It’s very simple engineering but satisfies a basic market with low performance expectations.

Multi-chip versions do the mixing at chip level

More products are using ‘multi-chips’ where a number of tiny LED chips are combined into the same module. This means that the colour mixing occurs as the light leaves the module. Their very small size means that tunable-white products can be made much smaller, so we’re starting to see downlights using the technology as well as linear systems. These multi-chips tend to have a higher performance specification than the individual LED strips, but nothing should be left to chance.

Colour rendering can be compromised

A lot of fuss is made, quite rightly, over the way that white light presents surface colours. We’ve come to expect a good quality of colour rendering, regardless of light source. Tunable whites are not exempt from this issue but it’s not always clear from manufacturers’ data how well a system is performing.

Cheaper products may advertise good colour performance at the extremes of the tunable range, where light is being delivered from either the warm or the cool channel, but there’s no certainty that the mixed light performs equally well. Generally speaking, the greater the number of channels, and systems vary from two-channel to five-channel, the better colours will look under them.

Not all tunable-white systems cover the same colour range

If there is one aspect of tunable-whites that the specifier needs to take great care over, it’s the colour temperature range that’s on offer. While some systems offer a wide natural ‘circadian rhythm’ range that shifts from candlelight to daylight, there are other systems with a much smaller range, from 2500K to 4000K, which should only be considered as a decorative option.

There are three ways to control the tones

• The simplest systems use manual control to alter the white outputs. Expect to see a wall-mounted control panel or a hand-held remote control that enables you to adjust the colour of the light and the amount of light output. There is nothing scientific about this. It’s left entirely to personal preference, which may – or may not – be a good thing.
• Some tunable controls are designed to replicate the effect of dimming on a filament source, where two things happen at the same time. As the light output is dimmed, the lamp warms up in the same way as a traditional tungsten filament lamp. This is still a manual control method, but has the benefit of mimicking a filament light source. The tunable range tends to be very small, again mimicking the conventional tungsten lamp.
• More sophisticated control strategies are designed to manipulate the circadian rhythm of room occupants. This means that the lighting settings are programmed into the control architecture. Shifts in colour temperature and light level can be pre-set or can be instigated by a manual over-ride. This is the method that’s being used in recent school installations in Scandinavia.

Three discrete channels could be a solution

It’s been pointed out that not all ‘tunable-white’ mixing requires a full colour range. Complex tunable-white schemes mean that you should be able to call up any colour temperature within the mixing range. But some clients will call for specific colour temperatures, often those that are commercially available, such as 3000K, 4000K, 6500K. If that’s the case, then it may be simpler – and cheaper – to consider having three discrete lighting channels operating separately within a bespoke housing.

Photo credit: Glamox Luxo

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Introducing the new Beta Panel

Beta Panel from Thorn is a recessed LED luminaire with high efficacy (94Llm/W) for high energy savings and provides 11 years of useful light, if on 12 hours per day (50 000 hours) and a 5 year warranty.

With seamless corners and a slim design Beta Panel has a sleek appearance. The luminaire provides a light output of over 3 200 lumens and it is available with a colour temperature of 4000K providing an exact colour match to fluorescent and a colour rendering index (CRI) up to 80.

Application areas for Beta Panel are general illumination as well as corridors and circulation areas. It offers an easy retrofit solution for luminaires with conventional light sources (4x18W T26) and is suitable for installation in T-grid ceilings. In addition, the slim profile makes it suitable for installation in small ceiling void and can be surface mounted or plasterboard recessed (using an additional accessory).

In stock and available from Novel Energy Lighting, click here for details on the product:
Call us for volume pricing: 0208-540-8287, or email for further details: sales@novelenergylighting.com

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