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.

Enhancing Safety By Upgrading Parking Garage Lighting

As a property owner, two of your primary concerns are reducing costs while enhancing consumer satisfaction. But did you know that you can achieve both of these goals (and more) with one simple appliance switch? If you own a parking garage, whether it is a standalone garage, part of a residential building you own, or a commercial one, one of the best business decisions you can make is upgrading the parking garage lighting to LED options. Doing so will quickly help you realize the two aforementioned goals.

  1. Financial Savings.  Electricity does not come cheap. Especially when you need to power six stories of parking garage floors for 24 hours a day. LED lighting allows you to keep even the darkest corners bright at an incredible reduction in price. Our LED parking garage lighting boasts a 75% reduction in energy consumption which lends to an average of 60% financial savings over traditional lighting.
  2. Improved Safety.  A word about keeping those dark corners lit: It’s a business sense must. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, over 10% of property crimes occur in parking garages. Not to mention that a significant portion of slips and falls occur due to poor lighting conditions. By improving your garages (and other properties) with brighter, more efficient LED options, you can help reduce the legal or liability issues that may arise out of poor lighting situations.

Poor Warehouse & Distribution Center Lighting: An Overlooked Cause of Forklift Accidents

Forklifts can weight up to 10,000 pounds and may carry loads of up to one half their weight. This means a 10,000 pound forklift may carry 5,000 pounds, which totals 15,000 pounds. In busy warehouse & distribution centers, rushed forklift operators travel up and down warehouse aisles at speeds of 8 mph. At such a speed, a 15,000 pound forklift-load combination cannot stop on a dime. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that forklift accidents are all too common and cause many fatalities.

Some of the contributing factors to forklift accidents are:

  • Forklift operator distraction.
  • Floor worker distraction.
  • Insufficient operator training.
  • Loads obstructing the operator’s visibility.
  • Limited driver visibility when operating a forklift in reverse.
  • Poor warehouse lighting.

When accidents occur, the fault is often placed with the forklift driver. The typical remedy is to either replace the driver, or require that he receive more training. Other contributing factors are given less attention, especially inadequate warehouse lighting.

Warehouses with lighting levels below 2 lumens per square foot are accidents waiting to happen. This minimum lighting requirement also applies to the dimmest areas. Here are four suggestions for solving this problem:

  • Use effective lighting technology. Of the different lighting technologies in use, LED lights put out the most illumination for the power consumed. They are also the most compact and rugged, and have the longest operating life.
  • Your warehouse should have highly reflective walls, ceiling and floor. Light colored walls, ceiling, and a clean polished floor serve to scatter and further distribute your overhead LED lighting.
  • Add additional lighting to the darkest areas of your warehouse if required. This step ensures that you meet the 2 lumens per square foot minimum.
  • Change your forklift lights to LEDs. The bright white light combined with the forklift’s movement serve to catch the attention of floor workers.

These warehouse & distribution center lighting changes will reduce accident rates, which should reduce your workers compensation premiums and keep your workers and forklift operators safe.

Design Considerations for Manufacturing Lighting

Many elements go into creating a successful manufacturing facility, and good lighting is one component that should not be overlooked. Good lighting in an industrial facility can keep workers safe and more productive, and a cheerful, well-lit workplace can be good for morale. However careful consideration must be given to the lighting system, since not just any lamp will do.

Cost

In today’s global manufacturing environment there is a level of competition unknown to our predecessors, and companies must keep costs low in order to come out on top. Outdated lighting can eat up large amounts of energy and require frequent, costly bulb replacements. Less money spent on operating costs means higher profits overall, so products that offer great performance while keeping plant energy and maintenance costs low are an excellent investment.

Adequate Lighting

Poor light levels can make it more difficult, or even dangerous, for workers to do their jobs. Many tasks performed on the production floor require great attention to detail. In addition, safety is of the utmost importance in a manufacturing facility and workers must have adequate lighting to avoid any potential hazards. Manufacturing plants often have high ceilings, so lights must be powerful enough to reach the work floor. Consideration should also be given to color and placement of lights to optimize lighting levels in the facility.

Resilience

Finally, the conditions found in an industrial environment are harsher than those of, say, a shopping mall or high school gymnasium. Manufacturing lighting must be resilient enough to withstand harsh conditions like high humidity, heat, vibrations, chemicals and large equipment that could damage it.

At Relumination, our seasoned professionals are well-versed in manufacturing lighting design and will work with you to design a lighting layout that is ideal for your facility.

LED Lighting: It’s Time to Let Go of Glass Tube Technology

LED is short for “light emitting diode.” The light emitting part of the name is easy enough to understand. However, the diode part is less so for many non-technical people. A diode is a solid state device that allows electric current to flow in one direction only. Diodes are used in electronics, and exceedingly small diode elements are present within the integrated electronics used in computers. In any case, an LED is a diode that lights up when electricity flows through it.

Before solid state devices such as diodes and transistors were invented, radios and even computers were made from glowing glass tubes called vacuum tubes. These put out lots of waste heat and didn’t last long. Thanks to solid state devices, commercial electronics and especially computers advanced rapidly. They got smaller, became more powerful, and consumed less energy. Today, the only vacuum tube based computers are found in museums.

Oddly enough, the lighting industry took much longer to make commercial use of solid state LEDs. It’s also odd that we still use vacuum tube based lighting, otherwise known as incandescent lights. An incandescent light is just a glowing filament placed inside a vacuum tube. Like the vacuum tubes used in the old 1950s computers, incandescent lights put out tremendous waste heat.

In fact, about 90% of the electricity that powers an incandescent bulb turns into heat. The old vacuum tube computers required constant maintenance to replace vacuum tubes that were always burning out. Likewise, incandescent light bulbs require a fair amount of maintenance compared to LED lighting.

In some ways, fluorescent lighting is an improvement over the incandescent bulb. But it too, is just glass tube technology that uses a gas as its “filament.” It’s just as bulky and fragile as incandescent lighting and puts out more waste heat than LEDs. Why didn’t glass tube based lighting die off like the vacuum tube based computers and electronics? Because glass tube lighting does its job well enough, provided you have plenty of energy to waste.

Today, many business owners are learning first hand about the cost savings in reduced energy use and reduced maintenance requirements of LED lighting. They have chosen to leave the old glass tube, 20th century dinosaur technology behind.