Data Center Efficiency: Three Benefits of an LED Commercial Lighting Retrofit

A data center processes, stores, and distributes data for a single organization or many organizations. It is filled with computer servers that together, consume considerable power. The servers also produce considerable heat, which in turn requires air conditioning.

This adds up to a costly power bill. Data centers work to minimize power consumption by consolidating the work loads of its servers, eliminating unnecessary computing, and using more efficient servers. Some data centers have reduced air conditioning power consumption by increasing their room temperatures by several degrees. However, there is still more room for improvement by doing a commercial lighting retrofit with LEDs. Here are three reasons for this:

  • LEDs consume less power. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, a 12 watt LED light puts out the same lighting as a 15 watt CFL light or a 60 watt incandescent light. This amounts to a 20% and 80% power reduction respectively. In addition, an LED light outperforms an energy-saving incandescent light by 72%.
  • LEDs produce less heat. This is a consequence of its higher energy efficiency, since energy not converted to light becomes waste heat. Less heat production from LEDs places a smaller load on air conditioning, which saves on AC power consumption.
  • LEDs can be turned on and off without a warm-up period and are easily dimmed. LEDs are compatible with smart control systems that use motion sensors to turn on lighting when someone enters a room, and turn off lighting when no one is present. It can be used with external lighting sensors that adjust LED brightness according to ambient light coming in from windows.

Summarizing, LEDs themselves consume less power, their reduced heat output means your AC system consumes less power, and you can easily use them more efficiently with automation technology.

The Many Benefits of Motion Activated LED Lighting

LEDs are ideally suited for use with motion sensor technology. And while there are many benefits and uses of LED lighting in business settings, combining them with motion sensors expands the possibilities further. Here are five benefits:

Saves Energy

If you are already using energy-efficient LED lighting, why not get more of a good thing by having them turn off automatically when no one is using a room, and switch on when people enter? LEDs require no warm up time and have no problems with being turned on and off as people go in and out of a work area. Another benefit is there is no need for you or an employee to make sure the lights are off at the end of the day.

Increases Convenience

The problem with light switches is you have to find them in a dark room. This is especially difficult for visitors or employees unfamiliar with the room. Sometimes the elusive switches are inside the room next to the door somewhere, and sometimes they’re outside. The problem is yet more awkward when a person entering a dark room is using both hands to carry something. These problems go away with LED lighting activated with motion sensors.

Improves Safety

One way to ensure that stairwells are well-lit when people use them is leaving their lights on all the time. The same is true for outside walkways and parking lots. However, motion activated LED lighting ensures that people can watch their step where they need to while saving energy as well.

Increases the Longevity of Your Lights

Although many LEDs last 50,000 hours, turning them off when not needed further increases their working life. This means money is saved on the LED replacements and on the installation labor.

Gets Customer Attention in Retail Stores

If you want to ensure that customers notice specific product displays, motion activated lighting of the display will certainly get their attention. In fact, it will do a better job than using signs with large bold lettering, to which the public has become blind.

The above listing is just a sampling of the many benefits of LED lighting when used with motion detectors.

2 Helpful Lighting Maintenance Tips From The Pros

As a commercial property owner, it goes without saying that your building is constructed with plenty of indoor and outdoor lighting. And in order to enjoy the benefits and safety of good lighting, proper routine maintenance is required. Fortunately, unless there is a mysterious problem going on with the lighting or a repair needed, there are a couple of simple maintenance tips you can rely on to take care of lighting yourself. Let’s take a look at two lighting maintenance tips from the pros that any commercial property owner can use for more optimal lighting.

  • Look Out For Exposed And/Or Damaged Cables: This is something you especially want to pay close attention to in regard to your exterior lighting, particularly lighting that goes with your landscaping. Every once in a while, inspect the area for any exposed or damaged cables. When they are exposed, it can lead to further damage to electric wiring. If you notice exposed cables, examine them for damage before burying them back into the ground again. In the event that you aren’t certain whether or not a cable is damaged, call a professional lighting expert to take care of the issue for you.
  • Perform Routine Cleaning Tasks: Just as you would clean any other part of your building, so too should you clean your lighting fixtures, especially those outside. With a soft rag, dust off components and the bulbs and remove any dirt, debris, dust, branches, or other substances that could cause your lighting not to work optimally. Cleaning the lighting fixtures occasionally will allow you to enjoy longer-lasting lighting.

Retail Lighting: Why You Should Choose LEDs for Jewelry Display

Jewels are remarkable because of their crystalline beauty and the way they interact with light. When arranged on a ring or in some other form of jewelry, they become a work of art. Few products rely as much on visual presentation as jewelry. This is why their retail lighting is so important. For example, the four C’s of diamonds, which are color, clarity, cut, and carat, cannot be fully appreciated when displayed under poor lighting. Poor lighting distorts their color and diminishes their sparkle.

The best display lighting is soft sunlight. However, common lighting such as incandescent and halogen don’t even come close. Incandescent bulbs put out a color more similar to candlelight than sunlight, while the light from halogen bulbs turn yellowish during their lifetime.

On the other hand, LED lighting nearly duplicates the sun’s white light without its harmful ultraviolet radiation. Of the interior lighting available today, only LEDs fully bring out the diamond’s sparkle and dazzle. LEDs most accurately display the true colors of any object, including jewelry.

Here are three more reasons to choose LED lighting for your jewelry display:

  • LEDs last for 50,000 hours. During this time, their output remains constant. They don’t turn yellow or flicker when reaching the end of their service life.
  • LEDs produce little heat. This has three associated benefits. Their small heat output makes them safer than other lighting such as incandescents. Less heat output means they consume less energy for a given lighting brightness. This saves on your lighting bills. Less heat also means you use less air conditioning in the summer, which reduces your energy bill.
  • LED brightness is easily adjusted. This gives you yet more control on the presentation of your jewelry.

To display the full brilliance of your jewelry, use LED lighting and spend less money on lighting and air conditioning.

Is Your Cold Storage Still Safely Lit?

From cut flowers to pork chops, there are dozens of industrial reasons why your business needs cold storage. These marvels of modern technology transformed the agricultural, brewing, and food service industries over a century ago and become more advanced with each decade. Your cold storage room may have a magnetic locking door, regulated ventilation, and digital temperature controls but it should definitely have bright, clearly illuminating electric lights.

The Hurry to Warm Up

The effectiveness and safety of your cold storage unit(s) should be checked at least once a year, and cleaned every week that it is frequently used. Unfortunately, cold storage safety is easy to skimp on without thinking about it. Even if you do regular cleaning and safety checks, it’s cold in there! Especially for freezer units, your body is wary about letting you linger in the cold. Too long and it starts sending urgent messages to leave and warm back up. This can cause people to hurry away from cold storage tasks without even realizing they have done so! This year, resolve to put on a coat and take a couple of rounds cleaning and securing your cold storage.

Staying Safe on Icy Surfaces

When checking on your cold storage, there are a few regular safety considerations. Due to the nature of cold storage, floors can become both dirty and icy. To deal with this, mop from wall to wall regularly and lay down thick, secure rubber mats on the floor between the shelves and anywhere you expect to step. Icy build-up on the walls commonly known as ‘freezer burn’ can be scraped away or melted with warm water, just remember to move shelves and goods away from the wall before bringing down the ice.

Staying Safe with Strong Lights

Changing light bulbs in your cold storage can be a freezing pain, but it is vital to continued safe use of your unit. Insufficient lighting increases the body’s fear response to lingering in cold temperatures. This combined with low visibility can drastically increase chances of both falling and dropping shelf items. Naturally you’ll want to change out your lights as little as possible so your ideal bulb is bright, long lasting, and produces very little heat.

Hospital Lighting: Improve The Well-Being Of Your Patients

Light has a major impact on human performances and human health because of its ability to enable essential chemical reactions in the human body. Light also enables us to effectively perform various visual tasks, and light also has an impact on our moods, emotions, and our perception of everything.

Since light has an impact on our body’s circadian system, light has a major impact on the outcome in healthcare facilities. When many patients are in hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical facilities, they can often find themselves depressed and sad. Light can have a major impact in hospital settings, due to its ability to:

  • Reduce the length of a patient’s hospital stay
  • Allow the patients to get a better sleep rhythm
  • Lessening the pain in all patients
  • Improving the moods of patients who have dementia
  • Improving the work environment for the medical staff members who have to work at night

When your hospital lighting is improved, you will instantly see a difference in the health and well-being of all of your patients and your staff members. Improved hospital lighting should be incorporated in any healthcare setting, and not only because of how beneficial it is to patients.

LED lighting can be incorporated into your hospital at an affordable cost

Hotel Lighting: Save On Operational Costs And Create An Enjoyable Experience

Managing a hotel brings its own set of challenges. It is not an easy job to keep your guests happy while trying to keep your employees motivated to perform at a high level on a daily basis. Even if you do have success, you will still need to effectively monitor all of your operation costs so you can keep both sides happy.

However, while you are monitoring you operating costs, you should not have to lower your operating costs at the expense of the quality of services you provide. When hotel guests visit your hotel, they expect to be comfortable and they expect to be treated well by your entire staff. When you are considering making important decisions regarding operational costs, you should always consider how the changes will impact the type of comfort you can offer your hotel guests.

Although every hotel operates differently, every hotel owner or hotel manager wants to retain the loyalty of their current customers. They also want to be able to attract new customers. One of the best ways to increase comfort in your hotel is to take advantage of the LED lighting technology. The LED lighting technology has given every industry, especially the hotel industry the opportunity to operate at a greater efficiency.

LED lighting requires less energy, repairs, and maintenance. As a hotel owner, manager, or operator, you will have the ability to take control of the type of lighting you want to offer, while saving money at the same time. You will have the ability to create the perfect ambiance in the hotel rooms, the lobbies, the bars, lounges, breakfast room, etc. Your hotel guests will not just see your hotel as a place to stay, they will begin to see your hotel as an entire experience that will allow them to sleep, eat, drink, and have an incredible time.

Reduce Your Energy Bills And Enhance Your Parking Lot Lighting

Many businesses that have been operating for longer than ten years will likely have some lighting fixtures that have become outdated. When lighting at your business is outdated, you will find yourself paying some very costly energy bills. There was once a time when many businesses did not really think too much about parking lot lighting.

However, parking lot lighting should always be considered a high priority for every business that has a parking lot. A parking lot is the place where employees, customers, etc. park their cars and walk through the doors of your business. Your parking lot lighting needs to be able to provide everyone with a safe and secure location, regardless of what time of day it is.

There are multiple things you will need to consider when it is time to enhance your parking lot lighting:

  • Do you prefer to use bright lights?
  • Do you want lights that will be consistent with their lighting?
  • What type of colors do you want your lights to display?
  • How long will your lights last?
  • How much will it cost for you to have your lights on at all times?

If you really want to understand how beneficial an improved lighting system can be, you should have a full understanding of how your current lighting system has worked over the years. If you are not sure of what type of fixtures you have been using, you should ask one of your maintenance employees.

Reduce Office Worker Eyestrain with LED Bias Lighting

Eyestrain is a common problem faced by many office people who work in front of a computer monitor for hours at a time. It causes tired eyes, headaches, blurred and sometimes double vision. Although some of the symptoms seem serious such as double vision, the effect is temporary and only requires rest to eliminate the problem. However, long hours in front of a computer are unavoidable for many workers and therefore, constantly taking long rests is not an option.

Fortunately, computer monitor eyestrain is greatly reduced by adjusting the surrounding workspace lighting. There should be no bright lighting in front of the monitor screen because this will cause glare-like reflections off the screen that cause eye fatigue and strain. In addition there shouldn’t be bright sources of light behind the monitor that shine directly into the worker’s eyes. These also produce glare.

Once these glare sources are taken out, there remains another source of glare: the monitor screen itself. The reason for this is that the screen is a bright source of light set against a darker backdrop. The problem is the contrast between the brightness of the screen and the background.

This is easily solved by using bias lighting against a wall behind the monitor. That is, you want to backlight this wall enough so that its brightness matches that of the monitor. A simple strip of LED lights placed on the backside of the monitor that illuminates the wall does the trick. These lights don’t shine directly into the worker’s eyes because they’re behind the monitor and are aimed in the opposite direction toward the wall.

LED brightness is easily adjustable so that the backlit wall brightness is readily made to exactly match the monitor screen’s brightness. Why does this work? Because the eye’s pupil adjusts to the average brightness of whatever is in front of it. When the background behind the monitor is dark, the pupil is enlarged and allows more light into the eyes. This makes the monitor a harsh source of light.

When the background is as bright as the monitor, the pupil contracts and allows less light into the eyes. This effect is similar to stepping outside in the sunlight and allowing the pupils to adjust. Everything has the same illumination level, so there is no glare source. Glare is essentially big contrasts in brightness.