Will Solar Wallpaper be The Key to Lighting Sustainability?

Solar panels and electric lights have been getting quite cozy over the past few years. Whether it’s highway lamps charged up during the daylight hours, or businesses who dedicate their solar arrays to keeping the interior lights on, a huge amount of renewable power is being spent to make sure we never have to deal with the dark. Of course, for businesses who are looking for new and innovative ways to keep the lights on, the answer may have come from a former Chinese furniture store.

Does Solar Wallpaper Offer Sustainability For Lighting?

Len Gao and Phillip Gao are a father and son who, for years, used their furniture business as a way to finance their solar power ambitions. The result,according to Sustainable Brands, is that their new business Sunflare has produced a product unlike anything else; solar wallpaper.

It may sound ridiculous, but it’s actually not. These solar panels lack the stiff, glass substrates found in traditional solar arrays, and they are significantly thinner. Which means that, if someone wished to, they could put these panels up as wallpaper. Perhaps in the sun room.

An Open Design That Welcomes, and Saves Energy Costs

With the ability to put solar panels up inside, businesses may start re-thinking their designs. After all, if you can put up a bunch of windows to let in natural light, then you’re saving costs, and generating electricity at the same time. And, if a business combines these subtle solar panels with efficient lighting systems, like light-emitting diodes, then it’s possible they may never need to pay to keep the lights on again.

How LED Lighting Will Benefit Your Business

As a business owner it is important to have good lighting around your store or warehouse. Many businesses have made the switch to LED lighting to not only save money, but also cut down on lighting maintenance. Below are 5 benefits to making LED lighting upgrades at your business.

1. Reliability: One of the main benefits of LED lighting is its reliability. This is attractive for both commercial and industrial businesses, as it means less time is spent changing out faulty lights. LED lamps have a life span of over 50,000 operating hours, which greatly reduces the amount of a time a business will spend on lighting maintenance.

2. Color Options: LED lights, unlike incandescent lights, are able to produce light in a wide range of color spectrum. These options allow business owners to set the tone in a given space, based on its lighting needs. These color temperatures include:

  • Warm White– This is the light that most people are familiar with, and is most commonly used for intimate locations such as restaurants or lounges.
  • Natural White– This shade is cooler than warm white, using more white than yellow. This light is best used for commercial applications, such as in offices.
  • Daylight White– This shade most closely resembles natural sunlight. Some locations that would benefit from daylight white are large areas such as conference rooms, classrooms, and retail stores.
  • Cool White– The best application for cool white light is in areas that require intense light, while offering high contrast. Some examples are jewelry stores or art galleries.

3. Brightness: Not only does LED lighting offer a wide range of color options, it is also brighter than traditional incandescent or florescent lighting. This is due to the fact that LED lights convert more energy into visible light, as opposed to heat.

4. Energy Savings: Since LED lighting emits more visible light, rather than producing heat, upgrading can greatly reduce your energy costs. Many businesses must leave lights on 24/7 for safety and security reasons, so keeping electricity costs down is key. Since very little heat is produced, it will also cut cooling costs during the summer months.

5. Upgrading is Simple: When it comes time to upgrade your current lighting system, LED lights can easily be designed and manufactured to fit your current specifications.

If you are looking for ways to cut costs for your business, while adding the appropriate color of light to any given space, it is time to make an upgrade to LED lighting.

Why LED Lighting Improves Office Productivity

An optimal office environment requires more than keeping it well lit, maintaining a comfortable temperature, and providing workers with the right tools. These are only the basics and don’t include more subtle environmental factors. Subtle effects such as the brightness of the lighting and its spectrum of color components, play an important role throughout the course of the work day. Although you can, with some effort and focus, achieve spectacular productivity in less than ideal conditions for an hour or two, the subtle environmental effects will take their toll over the course of the day and workweek.

Light brightness can produce eyestrain when it’s too dim. Unfortunately, many office environments overcompensate with lighting that’s too bright. This produces fatiguing glare and likewise causes eyestrain. The right amount of light will vary depending on the task. The ideal lighting that reduces computer screen glare for example, is different from that required for reading text off a sheet of paper, which depends on reflected light. This is solved with an adjustable light source for the different types of work. LED lighting readily accommodates this.

LED lighting is unique in that it is whiter than other types of lighting. The reason is that its light has a fuller color spectrum and closely resembles sunlight (minus the UV rays). Specifically, LEDs have more blue light.

It’s this blue light that boosts your mood and alertness when outdoors on a sunny day. This means that workers in LED lit rooms without windows will not feel like they’re working in brightly lit caves. The blue light component boosts their mood, alertness and productivity. Unlike a window however, the weather won’t affect the output of an LED light.

Some have exploited this “outdoor lighting” effect by installing LED panels in the ceiling that look like skylights. Others have taken this further and devised LED ceiling panels that simulate white clouds floating under a blue sky.

When considering the period required for LED lighting to pay for itself, most estimates only take energy savings into consideration.

Simple Summer Energy-Efficiency Tips

The heat is on and it is tough to keep your home cool while lowering your energy bill. These simple summer energy-efficiency tips will cool your home without the huge cooling bill.

Dial Down the Thermostat: Do not cool an empty home. Buy a programmable thermostat for your home and set the air conditioner to cool your home before arriving home. When you are only home 12 to 14 hours of the day there is no need to cool your home 24 hours

Cover the windows: When the sun comes through your windows it heats your home and fades your furnishings. Install curtains, shades or blinds to block the heat in the summer while protecting your flooring, paintings, and other furnishings.

Cool showers and laundry: Reduce your water heater temp or reduce the water temperatures of showers and laundry loads. Your clothing last longer with cooler water temperatures. A cooler, shorter shower make you more comfortable in the warmer temps.

Seal the heat out: Hot air leaks through the cracks and crevices around windows and doors. Add insulation around window and door frames where gaps allow heat entry. Remove the frame and push strips of insulation around the door and replace.

Close the gap around pipes: Your heating and cooling pipes with gaps require added insulation to keep cool air from escaping. Inspect all your furnace and air conditioner pipes and connectors. When a connector is loose, tighten and insulate around it.

Use fans to increase the cool: Ceiling and stand-up fans are less expensive to run. Set ceiling fans are to circulate air in an efficient way. Placing floor fans around your home increases airflow, increasing the cooling effect.

Grill or microwave your food: Using your grill keeps the heat outside. Microwave your food and reduce heat from cooking, that normally would warm your home.

Keep hydrated: Drink water, tea and other cool drinks to keep your core body temperature down. You will feel cooler when hydrated.

Power down: Use power strips to turn off appliances and electronics when not in use. Phantom energy increases your bill.

Spend more time outdoors: You have a patio, deck or porch to enjoy. Keep your thermostat down while you are outdoors, Use your air condition only when you are actually indoors.

Try these ten simple summer energy-efficiency tips and reduce the energy use and lower your energy bills.

High Productivity and Safety Start with Your Warehouse & Distribution Center Lighting

Thanks to the rise of online stores (e-commerce), distribution centers that cater to this industry are busier than ever. They take orders from online store owners, and ship the products directly to the stores’ customers. This means that a high volume of goods are shipped every day in the form of small orders. Pulling this off efficiently is essential to staying competitive, and many of these warehouses try to cope by using sophisticated productivity technology.

However, if you manage such an operation, you shouldn’t overlook the basics, such as warehouse lighting. Your lighting affects productivity in a number of ways. Poor lighting causes more product picking errors from the inventory shelves. This means that the wrong products are shipped to customers, which result in costly product returns and lost customers.

Poor lighting also leads to eyestrain and worker fatigue. This is particularly the case when using dim and flickering fluorescent lights. Worker fatigue hurts you in two ways. First, tired workers are less productive, which means your operation’s efficiency suffers. Second, tired workers make more mistakes, which compounds the product picking error problem.

Poor lighting also increases accidents, especially in warehouses bustling with activity. Busy people sharing dimly lit aisles with busy forklifts are accidents waiting to happen. Inefficient lighting also puts out a lot of waste heat. This extra heat can make your warehouse unbearable during the summer months, which will require expensive air conditioning to keep your workers productive.

Many companies are solving their warehouse & distribution center lighting problems with LED lighting. Its bright and uniformly distributed output solves the visibility and eye fatigue problem. Unlike fluorescent lighting, it doesn’t flicker. LED lights are also energy efficient. Lighting converts electricity into heat and light. Efficient lighting turns more of that electricity into light, and less into heat. This reduced heat output means you can keep your workers cool with less air conditioning in the summer. This results in less energy consumption by your air conditioners and your lighting. Another benefit is reduced maintenance costs thanks to the longer life of LED lighting.

In conclusion, LED lighting increases the efficiency of your distribution center, and saves money on energy consumption and maintenance. Before spending a fortune on sophisticated productivity technology, try using better lighting first.

New Lighting Technology for Energy-Efficiency

To achieve better illumination, industrial, manufacturing, and commercial sites are retrofitting old metal halide and high-pressure sodium lighting systems with next generation LED lighting. In the process, those sites are realizing substantial energy-efficiency benefits from those LED lighting systems.

An LED lighting system can generate the same or better luminosity as a traditional lighting systems while consuming less than half the electrical energy as a traditional system might require. The costs of retrofitting a traditional industrial or commercial lighting system with an LED system will be recouped in twelve to eighteen months after installation solely from reduced energy utilization. Next generation LED systems can operate for up to 50,000 hours continuously, and in some cases for more than 100,000 hours. This reduces maintenance and replacement costs as well.

Newer LED systems have also responded to the criticisms of degrading luminosity that had affected the first generation of LED’s. LED manufacturers have developed heat sink technology and other systems that reduce the thermal load on LED luminaires. Reduced thermal loads extend the life and performance of LED’s and keep fixtures operating at peak performance for several years.

Industrial and commercial sites that retrofit with LED systems will also experience secondary energy efficiency benefits from improved employee safety and performance. LED lighting is closer to natural lighting than traditional illumination systems. Employees are better able to distinguish fine detail and contrasting features in objects under LED light. These improvements lead to reduced employee fatigue and better overall operational efficiency.

 

Protect Your Customers, Protect Your Business

You want to protect your business, and you also want your customers to feel safe.  How can you accomplish that with a minimum of expense?  Parking lot lighting can go a long way toward all these ends when done properly.

Protect Your Business

Outside lights are a big deterrent to criminals.  The LAPD lists outdoor lighting as a way to protect your business, and the city of Charleston, SC calls lighting the “most cost-effective deterrent to crime.”  If the police are telling everyone that lighting is one of the best ways to keep criminals at bay, shouldn’t we listen?

Keep Your Customers Safe

Safety and security are not the same.  According to FacilitiesNet, Safety requires light to see tripping hazards, while security requires lighting that allows people to see faces, etc.  Both under-lighting and over-lighting increase certain risks.  That’s why it’s important to have a professional examine your space and work out the safest plan with a company that has nearly 10 years of experience.

Don’t Spend Too Much

Lighting is one of the least expensive options you have for adding security to your business.  Compared to a security company or lots of locks and bars on the windows, lighting is quite an appealing choice.  But what about running all those lights?  We use LED lights, which drastically cuts your costs.  Suddenly, you don’t have to worry about your wallet when it comes to lighting.

There are so many reasons to invest in outdoor lighting for your parking lot, we can only list a few here.

Will Giant Wind Turbines Provide Tomorrow’s Clean Energy?

Wind power is one of the biggest sources of clean energy in the world today. And while wind power has seen steady growth over the years as the technology has advanced, a new proposal might be able to blow away our expectations of just how much power we can generate from our wind.

Blades Bigger Than Two Football Fields?

According to the LA times, a research team that’s drawn members from four universities and two national laboratories is putting its heads together to design the biggest wind turbine we have ever seen. The initial designs, which have been tested in digital simulations, have blades that are 652.2 feet in length, and the towers supporting them 1,574 feet tall… which is a little over a third of a mile in height. Not only that, but the turbines will have two blades each, and the blades will be segmented in such a way as to catch the biggest amount of wind possible.

The term for this design is extreme scale, and it’s certainly an appropriate one.

How Much Power Will These Flower Towers Generate?

The goal of this massive wind turbine is, of course, to generate more power from a single structure. A single one of these huge turbines could generate as much as 50 megawatts of power, which is the size of a small power plant. To put that in perspective, that’s 20 times as much power as the current, average wind turbine.

That seems like a pretty snazzy goal, but the research for one of these titanic towers is just stepping out of the realm of the theoretical, and into the realm of the physical. The team has until 2019 to build a 1/10 scale model of a completed windmill, and to test it, in order to be able to move forward with the project. They’re just now getting started on this proof of concept, but as of this moment everything looks like it’s progressing smoothly. Whether that will continue to be the case, or the project will see an unfortunate wind change, remains to be seen.

Are Fossil Fuels Going Green Too?

You can’t turn on the TV, or read a news blog, without hearing about how the world is going green. Solar power is off like a rocket, wind energy is increasingly popular, and reliable green solutions like anaerobic digesters and ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) are becoming more widely used. Fossil fuels aren’t giving up the fight, though. In fact, according to Vox, Net Power is working with a variety of big names in energy to prove that we can burn fossil fuels without releasing any greenhouse gas emissions.

How Does That Work?

When you think of a typical fossil fuel power plant, it’s a pretty basic setup. A fuel like coal or natural gas is burned to heat water, the water turns into steam, and the steam turns the turbines. The steam is then cooled somewhere else, and that’s when the greenhouse gases like CO2 are expelled into the atmosphere. In order to make that kind of design safe, a company would have to build a secondary plant whose sole purpose is capturing the steam, and filtering out all of the unwanted materials so they aren’t released into the atmosphere. That represents a huge drain on power, efficiency, and costs.

But what if you could build a greener plant, without the need for a secondary processing plant to catch and trap the emissions? That’s what Net Power is currently doing in North Carolina. It just broke ground on a 50 megawatt power plant that will act as a proof-of-concept to show that it’s possible to generate electricity on a large-scale by using natural gas, but without the associated greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason Net Power’s plant should be able to accomplish this feat, while also maintaining as much as 59 percent efficiency, is its unique design. It uses pure oxygen instead of air, a liquid turbine instead of a steam one, and it keeps the CO2 in liquid form, where it can be easily contained. Additionally, these plants use smaller components, and take up a lot less space.

But They’re Still Burning Fossil Fuels

The important point not to lose sight of is that Net Power’s plants still use fossil fuels. Yes, they’re more efficient, and they’re trapping their emissions so they won’t harm the atmosphere, but unless we suddenly find something we can do with all that liquid CO2, then they’re just delaying the inevitable need for green power.

Which is why the technology should be looked at as a transitional one.

If inefficient power plants belching emissions into the atmosphere could be streamlined, and remade into more environmentally friendly power plants, then it would be a step in the right direction. Not only that, but they would buy time for green resources to step up and take the burden from fossil fuels. Rather than going cold turkey from natural gas and coal, the world would be using a kind of fossil fuel patch to step down its needs. Something that these more advanced designs could provide, if we use them as stepping-stones between where we are, and where we need to be.

The benefits of converting your business to LED lighting

For any business, the initial benefit of conducting LED lighting is the long-term cost savings. Yes, bulb-for-bulb, LED lighting does have a higher initial cost compared to incandescent lighting. However, over the course of an LED light’s lifespan, the real-life costs are a mere fifth of incandescent lighting.

Beyond the obvious cost savings aspect, there are three reasons why a business should consider upgrading their lighting to LED.

  1. Typically, LED lighting does not require equipment upgrades or replacement. Most incandescent bulbs have a direct equivalent LED replacement. Changing the bulbs in your offices, signs, security lighting and accent lighting is fairly effortless and should not incorporate additional costs beyond that of the bulbs.
  2. Incandescent bulbs have an expected lifespan of 2,000 hours compared to 50,000 hours for an LED. For a business, this longer lifespan equates to cost savings in the form of less required maintenance and reduced on-site storage of replacement bulbs. Additionally, lighting for signs and security will be more dependable. LED bulbs are also harder to break than incandescent and fluorescent lighting
  3. From an aesthetic standpoint, LED lighting provides a business with an array of options. Because the bulbs last longer and are more dependable, signs will not flicker and interior lighting will provide a more comfortable and secure feeling for employees and customers. LED lighting also comes in a variety of colors that can be designed to accommodate company colors, to create ambiance, or to fit a specific need. Available colors cover the spectrum and can easily be controlled via preprogramming or by a mobile app.

Depending on your business’ needs, LED lighting is available in an array of styles and applications.