Spoilt For Choice!
As new light sources continue to enter the market at a rapid rate, the choice available to contractors becomes almost bewildering, says Ian Fursland of The Lamp Company.
The ever-present pressure to make lighting more efficient with better performance and lower cost of ownership is driving a vast increase in the number of new light sources entering the market. Not just in terms of new sources, such as LEDs, but also in terms of the choices within each category. So there are now many more types of compact fluorescent lamp (CFL), linear fluorescent lamp and high intensity discharge (HID) lamps such as metal halide and high pressure sodium.
Very often, this presents contractors with a major challenge in selecting the most appropriate light sources for a project. If the lighting has been specified by a lighting designer who lives and breathes lighting, they will have the specialist knowledge to make the right choice. But in many jobs this decision is left up to someone who doesn’t specialise in lighting and is expected to know about every aspect of the electrical installation.
In parallel, these new lamps are being introduced far more quickly than lighting installations are being replaced. So there are also many more lamps out in the field than ever before, which has major implications for maintenance contracts. For example, the safest bet when re-lamping is clearly to replace like with like but is that the best solution for the end user? There may be newer, more efficient or higher performance lamps that can be retrofitted to the same luminaire and control gear. Again, spotting that opportunity and selecting the right lamp is a very specialised business.
A case in point is the availability of CFLs to replace tungsten or tungsten halogen incandescent lamps. The CFL market has come on leaps and bounds in terms of size, light output, efficiency and, very importantly, price.
As they get smaller, CFLs can be used to emulate more applications that would traditionally have been the preserve of twirly, swirly and candle-shaped incandescent lamps, opening the way for more efficient decorative lighting – often using fittings that are already on the market.
Also, there are now CFLs with reflectors that can be used in place of halogen downlighters – either in a new installation or as a retrofit. These will provide a very similar light distribution to halogen spotlights, with a much longer life and lower energy consumption.
However, the colour temperature and colour rendering of the lamp is likely to be different to halogen so it’s a matter of getting the right balance of benefits against visual performance. Many building operators will be happy to go down that route to achieve lower cost of ownership but the options and implications need to be explained to them.
This was the case for florists Charlotte Rose, which was looking at replacing an inefficient lighting system that used mainly incandescent light sources. The owners of the store recognised the need to improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions but wanted to do so in the most cost-effective fashion.
The proposed solution was to retain the existing fittings and replace most of the incandescent light sources with energy saving CFLs. To determine just how cost-effective this would be the data was entered into our ‘cost of ownership’ program, which predicted savings of up to £850 per year through improved energy consumption. The florists will also reduce their carbon output by 9.23 tonnes over the lifetime of the bulbs.
Equally challenging for many contractors are the comparisons that have to be made when selecting the best light sources for a new project, particularly if it’s a design and build – or if the lamp specification is vague. In such instances, cost of ownership may be a key criterion so having access to a system that can make such calculations can be of great assistance.
Using such a system, however, requires an in-depth understanding that takes account of all of the variables to ensure that a meaningful comparison is made. For example, as noted earlier, there are now many more different types of HID lamp, which are finding a wider range of applications – from car parks to retail ‘sheds’. Here, the main decision used to be ‘what wattage will give the right lumen package for the mounting height?’; now such decisions also need to account for factors such as colour temperature, colour rendering and lamp life.
Given this level of variation and complexity, there is a strong argument for contractors to call on specialist assistance from lamp distributors – particularly as it needn’t cost anything. Lamp distributors have a much wider role than simply shipping boxes out of the door; they should also be able to add value through their knowledge and experience. The resource is there – it seems a shame to waste it.
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