Will Landscape Lighting Increase the Value of My Home?

If you’ve ever bought or sold a house, you know how important it is for a building to have curb appeal. First impressions make a huge difference when it comes to selling your home for a great price, and making small changes to your landscaping can really improve curb appeal! Read on to learn more about how landscape lighting can increase the value of your home.

Drawing Attention To Your Home

Landscape lighting can be effective at highlighting the most beautiful parts of your home. Make well-maintained plants, yards, or gardens glow with exterior lighting, or illuminate the sidewalk or walkway to your front door. Lights can help guests find their way in the dark, or can bring attention to your front door. Lighting welcomes visitors to your home and makes it feel like a warm and inviting place. A well-lit house is a welcoming and beautiful house! 

Landscape Lighting Can Help Keep Your Home Secure

The statistics on burglary and home invasion can alarm any home owner. A house that is lit up brightly at night is less attractive to burglars. While these lights can be a fantastic crime deterrent, leaving the lights on all night is wasteful, and will probably annoy your neighbors, so invest in lights with a motion sensor. When the sensor is triggered, the lights will go on, scaring off any potential invaders, and alerting you to the movement.

It’s Easy And Affordable

Adding exterior lighting can offer a huge return on investment. For a few hundred dollars and a few hours of work, you can boost your curb appeal and make your house worth more. Even if you aren’t planning on selling your house any time soon, it’s always a smart idea to keep improving your home. When it does come time to sell, you’ll be glad you made small changes!

Is It Time To Make Changes To Your Grocery Store Lighting?

Do your customers seem to enjoy shopping in your grocery store or do they just usually go through the motions during each shopping trip? If your customers usually just go through the motions, it could be time to think about making changes to your grocery store lighting. It could be time to make the change from traditional lighting to LED lighting. When you have LED lighting throughout your entire grocery store, you will see an improved overall look and feel throughout your entire grocery store. 

There has become a new standard for grocery stores when it comes to lighting. The old standard when it came to grocery store lighting was just a variety of fluorescent light bulbs. However, it did not take long for grocery store owners and managers to realize that fluorescent light bulbs were expensive to operate. LED lighting is less expensive to operate due to their energy efficiency and their ability to last for many years without needing any type of maintenance.

LED lights can be highly effective when it comes to your refrigerator cases and your freezers. Why? When you use fluorescent lights in your refrigerator cases and your freezers there will be a significant amount of light reduction. On the other hand, you will not have to worry about light reduction when it comes to LED lights. The freezer aisle of your grocery store will immediately look appealing and brand new just by making changes to your lights. All of your customers will be able to see your food items clearly and they will look better. Your customers will be more likely to purchase items when they can easily find them and when they look good in the store.

When you can create a bright, clean, and appealing shopping experience, your customers will be satisfied and they will be more likely to make frequent ships to your store. Are you ready to upgrade your grocery store lighting? Do not hesitate to contact us today.

5 Signs Your Commercial Property Needs to Retrofit the Light Fixtures

Every commercial building has its quirks. The inexplicably huge water heater, the spooky bathroom, the flickering light. Of course, these aren’t just weird things about your building, they’re structural clues. That huge water heater means your building could support a commercial kitchen. The spooky bathroom is an effect of echoing tile and insufficient lighting. And that flickering light? It’s a sign that your light fixtures are aging.

A lot of older commercial buildings are due to retrofit their fixtures and update the wiring. Here are five signs that your commercial property has outdated, costly, or dangerous lights that need a retrofit.

1) Flicking Lights
Flickering is often a sign that circuits and wiring are getting old. When the electrical connection isn’t consistent, or when the circuit can’t support the electrcal current, you get a flicker. If your lights flicker even after changing the bulb, this could be a sign of future danger. Getting a retrofit is a safety concern.

2) Expensive Bulbs
Of course, keeping your fixtures might have other consequences as well. If replacing your bulbs is more costly, in 1-5 years of replacements, than retrofitting, then the choice is obvious. Why keep buying expensive bulbs when you could upgrade to long-lasting, energy-efficient, and affordable LEDs?

3) Frequent Replacements
Another sign that your lighting is on its last legs is the frequency of bulb replacements. If you’re replacing your bulbs more often than once a year, that’s too much. Old light fixtures with unreliable electricity tend to burn out bulbs and possibly even explode them.

4) High Power Bills
Or they can soak up more power than the light is worth. An old, inefficient light fixture may draw more electricity than the bulb needs or can handle. Or that outdated bulb type uses more electricity than any modern form of lighting would ever require. Meaning a retrofit could save you a ton on utilities.

5) Rusting Fixtures
Finally, there’s actual fixture damage. If you can see rust, corrosion, or broken aspects of your light fixtures then malfunction and dangerous behavior aren’t far behind. Retrofitting at this point is preventative maintenance and just good responsible building management. Before your light fixtures start exploding lightbulbs or dropping screws out of the ceiling.


Do your light fixtures need retrofitting? Contact us today to consult on your commercial lighting needs!

Proper Light Placement: When Less is More

Proper indoor lighting is crucial in businesses that specialize in senior care. The natural decline of eye function with age means people in their 60s need 3 times as much light to effectively complete tasks as those in their 20s. It might seem like the answer is flooding the building with bright lights, but this isn’t effective. While certain eye conditions associated with age cause difficulty seeing in dim light, others create a sensitivity to glare and light changes. Proper placement of adjustable lights in hospitals and senior living facilities will allow you to use fewer lights with increased functionality.

Task Lighting

Lights with adjustable brightness and placement can be used to meet individual needs in many rooms. Living areas outfitted with adjustable lamps create effective spaces for reading or hobbies. Task lighting in the kitchen may include bright lights placed directly over cutting and cooking surfaces. Dimmer switches in these lights can be effective in eliminating glare. Instead of flooding bathrooms with bright light, carefully placed lighting around the sinks and mirrors can create the right environment for a safer shave.

Motion Sensors

It’s not unusual for seniors to suffer insomnia or need to get up during the night. Bathing a dark room in bright light can actually be counterproductive for aging eyes. While younger eyes may adjust in a moment, the pupils of seniors react slowly to changing light. This problem can lead to potentially dangerous nighttime falls. Equipping bedrooms, hallways, and bathrooms with motion sensor night lights can shed enough light to reveal obstructions without the addition of blinding glare. Wireless motion sensing lights can be stuck to walls close to the floor to provide adequate path lighting at night.

Increasing the amount of light is not always the answer for better visibility. Proper placement adds the right amount of light exactly where it is needed. Contact us at Relumination for more practical lighting tips to improve your business. 

How LED Lighting is Changing the World

There’s no doubt lights have changed a lot in the 130 years since Thomas Edison created the first light bulb. Lights have changed the world, this can be seen from pictures taken in space of the world at night, it’s amazing how much influence the light bulb has held over the past century. Now more recently, a new kind of light, that I’m sure you’ve heard of by now, is changing the world, the LED bulb.

A Light-emitting diode (LED) is a large advancement over traditional lighting. They consume far less energy and have a much larger lifespan than traditional lighting. It’s no surprise that many businesses have converted over to LED lighting. According to researchers, a decade from now almost half of commercial lighting will be LED. With lighting responsible for using approximately 20% of the world’s electricity, LED lighting is, without a doubt, the light of the future. It’s calculated that with LED lighting we can reduce the impact of lighting from using 20% to only using 4% of the world’s electricity, and save over 300 million barrels of oil per year in the U.S.

LED’s have been proven to be reliable, efficient and long-lasting. They are used in everything from flashlights to flat-screens and headlights on vehicles. Not only can LED lighting save you money as a business, but also as a taxpayer, municipalities are beginning to see the long list of benefits of making the switch to LED. For example, the city of Los Angeles plans to reduce their annual energy consumption for public lighting by 40% with the use of LED lighting. LED lights are bound to change the world, like Thomas Edison’s first light bulb did over a century ago.

As LED’s popularity grows the more they prove that they will pay for themselves. Its predicted that as technology furthers, LED lighting will become cheaper, making the initial investment in them payoff even quicker. Its no surprise that LED lighting is taking over the world, and it only makes sense to jump on board now! If your looking for LED lighting for your business contact us!

Why is LED lighting more energy efficient?

What makes LEDs more energy efficient than other types of lighting? LED lighting uses a completely different physical process than previous lighting technologies, and this is what makes it more efficient.

Incandescent Bulbs

Incandescent bulbs heat a piece of metal to a high temperature so that it glows white hot. Unfortunately, a lot of energy is lost as heat, as you can easily notice by putting your hand near an incandescent bulb.

Fluorescent Bulbs

Fluorescent bulbs actually operate by two physical processes in sequence. The first of these happens by running an electric current through mercury vapor, which causes the mercury atoms to emit ultraviolet (UV) light. This light is not visible, so fluorescent lamps require another step, and this is where fluorescence comes in.

Fluorescence is the process where a material absorbs light of one color and emits light of another color. In the case of fluorescent lamps, a material coating the bulb absorbs the UV light and emits visible light. This process is more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs because there is no need to heat a material. However, because it is a two-step process where each step is not perfectly efficient, its efficiency is still limited.

Another issue with fluorescent bulbs is that the mercury they contain is hazardous, and has to be disposed of properly.

LEDs

LED stands for light emitting diode. The diode is the physical object which emits light. This is a one-step process, which helps explain why LED bulbs are more efficient than fluorescent bulbs.

The material at the at the heart of an LED is a semiconductor. This material is able to directly absorb electric energy and emit light, which also helps keep efficiency high.

LEDs are not perfectly efficient. Their efficiency depends largely on the type of semiconductor material used. Scientists are constantly exploring new semiconductor materials to improve LEDs and provide better energy efficiency.

If you have any questions about LED lighting, please feel free to contact us.

3 Myths About LED Lighting

When any new type of technology is introduced or whenever there is something many people do not know about, there always seems to be a variety of false information being spread around. Unfortunately, this false information gets talked about so much that people begin to accept the false information as true information.

Since LED lighting is being used more now than in previous years, more myths and misconceptions continue to spread. We find it very surprising that so many people believe these myths and misconceptions because some of them can be very outrageous. We want to point out some of the common myths and misconceptions we have heard over recent years and finally disprove them.

Myth 1: LEDs Costs Too Much

When it comes to LED lighting, many people worry about the price tag, and this is very understandable. However, this may only be true if you are thinking about the overall costs as far from an upfront perspective. When you are discussing LEDs from an upfront perspective, it can be more expensive when you compare it to the other options on the table. However, LED lighting has a greater value when you look at it over the course of an entire lifespan. While you will pay more for an LED light bulb or light fixture, the usage of your electricity will not be as expensive. Also, you will not need to worry about constantly replacing light bulbs or paying for any repairs or maintenance on your light bulb or fixture.

Myth 2: Lighting Does Not Have A Big Impact On My Utility Bill

Many people do not see a need to change their lighting because they feel that it does not have a major impact on their electricity bill. However, the other items you have in your home have been designed to be more energy-efficient. Since other items in your home are being improved and are more energy-efficient, you will need to make changes to your lighting as well. If you do not make these changes, you can expect to see a high increase in the percentage that lighting accounts for in regards to your electricity bill.

Myth 3: LED Lights Are Not Bright 

Incandescent light bulbs were measured differently than it actually should have been measured. In previous years, the brightness was measured by wattage. However, the brightness of a light bulb should have been measured by lumens. As a result of brightness being measured incorrectly, people were not purchasing the correct lighting. Today, it is important to pay close attention to luminosity instead of the wattage of a light bulb.

Have you heard any of these myths about LED lighting? Have any of these myths led you to stay away from LED lighting? Do not let the myths about LED lighting stop you from changing your lighting. For more information on LED lighting, please do not hesitate to contact us today.

The Search for Better LEDs

Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, are an energy efficient source of light. They have many advantages over incandescent and fluorescent lights: they are more energy efficient and last longer. But LEDs are not perfect, and they could be better.

Problems with current LEDs

One problem with current LEDs is that they generate heat: not nearly as much heat as incandescent bulbs, but still some heat. If you have an LED light and you’ve ever held your hand close to it, you will know that it doesn’t get very hot. However, according to EurekAlert, in situations that require intense lighting, like vehicle headlights and stadium lighting, LEDs can get hot and this can cause problems.

LEDs get hot because the portion of energy that doesn’t get used to make light becomes heat instead. This causes the LED to get hot and that changes its properties. It may become less energy efficient or change color slightly.

Using computers to search for better LEDs

A chemistry professor at the University of Houston has been awarded a $656,000 NSF grant to look into this problem. Professor Jakoah Brgoch uses computers to better understand chemistry. What do computers have to do with chemistry? By making simulations, chemists can explore different models of how certain chemicals react with each other. Or, as in this case, they can explore how different materials would behave at various temperatures.

The goal of this research is to find LEDs that work well at low temperatures and continue to work well at high temperatures. In a few years, this technology might come to market and could be helpful for any number of situations that require intense light. If that does happen, Relumination will be there to help you choose the best option for your business. Please contact us if you have any questions about LED lighting.

LED Lighting For Your Commercial Space

One of the real workhorses in the LED lighting industry is commercial lighting. Lights that are used in the commercial industry need to be able to withstand the heavy flow of traffic in various areas, in addition to having enough efficiency to illuminate extra lighting and signs. Commercial lighting should do more than provide customers with the comfort level and safety they need, but the commercial lighting should also be appealing enough to attract the attention of those who are passing by.

There are many business owners that make the decision to use traditional signs and lighting for these type of tasks, but we suggest using something that will provide you with better results. As a commercial business owner, you are going to need lighting that is more enticing, efficient, and durable. The commercial lighting you need for your location should also be easy to customize so it can flexible enough to complement the style of your business.

Unlike the traditional lighting options you may have used in the past, LED fixtures will allow you to customize the look of our fixtures. When you have this type of versatility, the LED lights you use in your commercial property can create a variety of light colors that will be able to fit in any space. With the versatility of LED lighting, you can enjoy a variety of activities under the perfect lighting and colors.

LED lighting has become an option that is not only stylish and convenient but affordable as well. Since LED lighting fixtures do not require as much electricity as the traditional lights, LED lights will continue to be a budget-friendly and energy efficient option. When you use the latest and greatest LED technology, your lights will be able to produce over 50,000 hours of illumination. This means you can ultimately get up to 5 years of use with LED lighting.

If you would like more information on our LED lighting services, please do not hesitate to contact us today.

3 Reasons Why Your LED Lighting Retrofit Should Include a Redesign

Switching over to LEDs doesn’t just make your building more energy efficient. It makes it brighter. It gives you more lighting options. It even gives you remote access to your lighting settings. But it’s not just enough to rewire the sockets and improve your network. Your lighting needs to be redesigned for you to fully tap into all of the benefits of LEDs. Here’s why:

1. You get more brightness per unit.

No matter what building you have or the industry you’re working in, the lighting probably reaches a bare minimum of ‘sufficient.’ Either through general design or OSHA requirements, your incandescent or fluorescent lights do the job. But when you switch to LEDs, each bulb is capable of a lot more light. LEDs can run to approximately 3% of the sun’s brightness each, and that means your workspace is going to becoming very bright — maybe too bright.

Redistribute the lighting so your employees don’t have to worry about too much glare or light pollution as they work.

2. Directionality gives you more control over lighting the space.

Traditional bulbs emit light in every direction, and their covers could block off the lighting in a pseudo-attempt at directionality. But LEDs have an actual directional beam. With smart LEDs, you can even program that direction to change over time, along with brightness and color.

Your current lighting setup was designed based on the limitations of the time period. So update the configuration to match the new opportunities, especially in a retail or public space.

3. Make sure you meet new regulations.

Just like lighting technology updates, so do safety regulations. If you have freezers, regulations are tightening how much heat runoff can influence the temperature. Employee safety advocates also care about glare, lighting for overnight employees, and more. While you’re retrofitting your system for the new technology, redesign for compliance changes, too.