Three Benefits of Warehouse Lighting with LEDs

Warehouse operation can make or break a business. For many companies, it’s the bottleneck that slows down their customer fulfillment process. Therefore the warehouse manager should exploit every opportunity to improve warehouse productivity. One such opportunity is LED lighting. Here are three reasons to change your warehouse lighting to LEDs:

Emits a Fuller Spectrum of Light

LED lighting is similar to daylight except that it doesn’t have the harmful UV levels of sunlight. LED light is white and brighter per watt consumed than other commonly used lighting. This is particularly important in a warehouse environment because product picking errors are costly in terms of customer returns and lost business. A well illuminated warehouse is important for avoiding injuries where forklifts and workers on foot work side by side.

Increases Worker Productivity

LED lighting contains a blue light component that improves mental alertness in the same way as exposure to natural sunlight. This is an important consideration if you wish to boost the productivity of night shifts. The body’s circadian rhythm is cued by the presence or absence of the blue component of sunlight. Blue light signals the body that it’s daytime and triggers wakefulness, while its absence signals nighttime and triggers drowsiness. This effect of LEDs can potentially reduce night shift accidents.

Easily Used In “Smart Lighting”

LEDs are easily used with motion sensors and timers that can dim or turn them off in warehouse areas not being used. Unlike many other types of lighting, LEDs are readily dimmed, brightened, and turned on or off without their damage or reducing their operational life. They don’t require warm up periods, which means they turn on instantly. When combined with the low energy consumption of LEDs, smart lighting substantially lowers your warehouse lighting costs.

Hotel Lighting: 3 Lighting Tips For Your Lobby

A hotel is meant to be a home away from home for business travelers, families who are enjoying their vacation, or any other individual or group of people in need of a warm bed. There are many nuanced details to consider when crafting a warm, inviting accommodation for your guests and lighting is definitely a top priority. If you are looking for extra ways to make your hotel lobby more welcoming, check out these three hotel lighting tips.

  1. Choose Lighting That is Intrinsically Friendly: Since you are creating a setting that is a home away from home for your lodgers, you want your lighting to be many things, particularly friendly. Don’t go for harsh lighting in your lobby or anywhere else in the hotel. Strive for lighting that offers soft warmth and familiarity.
  2. Avoid Florescent Lighting Like The Plague: Florescent lighting is to be reserved for sterile, bland environments like dreary offices or school hallways, not a hotel lobby. Though it might seem like the most efficient, simplistic thing to do for your hotel lobby lighting, it could seriously leave your visitors with a sour impression. Many people dislike the harshness and coldness of florescent lighting and even complain of headaches. Additionally, florescent lighting does not nicely accent the decor and furniture in your hotel lobby the way warm lighting does.
  3. Strive For Elegance And Uniqueness: You want warm lighting, but you also want lighting that stands out and impresses your visitors. Give them something to remember. Go for lighting that doesn’t just offer light but is truly artistic in its form. You want the lighting to be representative of the feel of the entire hotel.

Design Considerations in Hotel Lighting

Many elements contribute to the success of a hotel, and hotel lighting is one that can make a huge impact in how customers perceive a hotel. Attractive fixtures enhance a room’s appearance, and bright lighting can project a cheery ambience, while dim lighting can lend a mysterious air to the establishment. At the same time, lighting must meet the needs of the hotel guests.

Whether the hotel guest is in town for business or leisure, the room should contain a variety of lights for different tasks, moods and times of day. There should be overhead lights as well as bedside and desk lamps. Bathroom lights should be bright enough to allow guests to easily perform the tasks required in getting ready for the day. A floor lamp near an easy chair provides good light for reading.

Dimmer switches help satisfy guests with different brightness needs. One room may house a businesswoman who requires ample lighting as she works late into the night on a big presentation scheduled for the next day, while the room adjacent holds a vacationing couple who desire dim, romantic lighting. Dimmer switches allow the guests to adjust the brightness to their liking.

The fixture style helps establish the ambience of the hotel, both in public areas and guest rooms. The style of the fixture should fit well within the overall decorating style of the room and coordinate with other design elements. Take shape and material into account when selecting fixtures for a particular room. For example, a modern, geometric, stainless steel fixture will look out of place in a room decorated with a traditional brick fireplace and claw foot arm chairs.

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.

Going Green Uncouples Economic Prosperity From Fossil Fuels

The recent explosion of green energy around the world has been busting a lot of myths over the past few years. The myth that green energy could never exist on an industrial scale was common for years, for example. But now there are at least four states in America who are getting all their power from renewable resources, and there are half a dozen states catching up to them. Green technology was always going to be prohibitively expensive, the common wisdom said, but the prices have all but tunneled into the ground as the market for green energy has surged, and demand has risen.

Perhaps the biggest myth that’s been held up about why we shouldn’t consider going green, though, is that it will hurt our economy to do so. After all, in a time where the whole world is coming out of a recession, is this the time to take such risky behavior?

Well, yes, as it turns out.

World Economy Grows Without Corresponding Greenhouse Gas Increase

For 200 years, any growth in the economy came with a growth in emissions. It makes sense, because when all major industries and electricity are powered by fossil fuels, a bigger economy that needs more energy means that more fossil fuels are being burned. However, when fossil fuels aren’t the only source of energy available, there’s no reason to use them to drive the economy.

Put another way, correlation does not prove causation.

Which is important to note, because for two years now world emissions have remained relatively stable, but the economy has increased, according to Quartz. This is due, in large part, to how so many countries have embraced green energy on an industrial scale. Additionally, since green energy remains a growing part of the economy, many countries are continuing to invest in it as a way to create new jobs, and provide necessary services to their citizens.

Is it possible to go green without compromising our lifestyles? It’s hard to say, but we do know that it’s possible to do it without driving our economy off a cliff.

Community-Oriented Clean Energy in New York City?

Something unusual is happening down on President Street in Brooklyn. Solar panels have been set up, and attached to a bank of computers. These computers monitor how much energy is generated, and how much is used, but they also give residents the ability to decide what happens to their own power. They can choose to sell every bit of excess energy to maximize their own profits, or they choose to donate power they don’t need, sending it to a low-income portion of the power grid. This experiment, using energy in a block chain setup, has major implications according to New Scientist.

A Different Kind of Clean Energy Revolution?

Green energy is a booming industry, and with governments working hand-in-hand with businesses, every year sees more solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy replacing old-fashioned fossil fuels. But the setup for homeowners has always been the same. You can set up solar panels that power your home, or which feed the grid, but you always have to go through your local utility. With this new block chain setup, that may not be the case in the future.

The idea is that people who produce power get to decide how it’s used, creating a microgrid that uses all the local energy. Given that these grids are considered more secure, and that they aren’t really affected by problems at the utility headquarters, there are a lot of people pushing for wider adoption. Lower overhead, fewer billing costs, and homeowners get to decide what to do with their own clean energy.

3 Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint in 2016

All commercial and industrial companies want to decrease their carbon footprint and reduce waste. While some view a reduction in waste as a difficulty, it’s actually quite simple to use less and shrink your consumption.

However, we’re not suggesting that you go “all in” and declare yourself carbon neutral, or that you reduce your CO2 emissions by 100%, but there are several ways that you can help lessen waste and reduce your carbon footprint.

Here are three ways that your commercial or industrial business can reduce its carbon footprint in 2016.

1. Know where you stand on carbon waste and start from there. It’s difficult to reduce if you don’t know what you use. Find out what sort of emissions your buildings emit and start setting up a strategy. Measuring your carbon footprint will help you set up a plan to reduce it. Then, after you outline a plan of attack, you can begin the next phase.

2. Look for solid reduction opportunities and put that plan in place. A handy strategy is to identify low to no-cost methods of reduction. For example:

– Reduce heating and cooling bills by setting up a waste reduction strategy on temperature settings and usage.

– Place lights on a timer or install sensors.

– Replace old lighting fixtures with energy-efficient LED bulbs.

3. Upgrade outdated systems with newer energy-conscious versions. Simple tricks that lead to less waste carry more weight than you’d imagine. For instance:

– Place darkened screen films over windows to cut cooling costs in summer.

– Consider using solar panels and wind power to use less energy altogether.

– Upgrade your company vehicles to use renewable sources of fuel will reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

Help Your Business By Implementing Energy Reduction Lighting

No matter what kind of business you own, whether you operate a large warehouse or something smaller, it’s always important to consider energy reduction lighting. In today’s day and age going green is important, not only for the benefit of the environment and the marketability of your business but also because at the end of the day, it can save you money.

Why focus on lighting?

Focusing on lighting as an emphasis for your business is important for two reasons. First, you are paying for it, and second, it makes an impression on your stakeholders. Especially if you own any type of retail or hospitality business, your lighting plays a crucial part in making that all-important first impression.

There is a reason people will talk about mood lighting, because you can create the mood or environment you want to occur in the minds of your customers by picking the correct style of lighting. If you are trying to equip a warehouse or a much larger space, lighting is important again because you are paying for the energy used, but also you want to make sure your space is nice and bright so as to avoid any accidents.

Energy Efficient Lighting

When you are redesigning a lighting plan for your business, be sure to consult with professionals. When professionals assess your lighting situation, your individual wants, needs, and requests will be taken into consideration.

Also, all the new lighting you’ll get will be energy efficient – which will result in an overall energy reduction for your business. By using less energy, you’ll be saving money – which, as you know, is always hugely important when you run a business.

6 Things to Consider About Energy-Efficient Lighting

If you are thinking about energy-efficiency (who isn’t these days?) and about buying some of the smart building products on the market, we have some ideas to help you. Here are 6 things to consider about lighting control.

  • Networked Lighting Systems. One of the smart ways to save energy dollars is to upgrade to a network lighting system. These systems combine digital sensors with lighting capability and smart controls. They also give you the ability to analyze data collected by the system. You want a system that is energy-efficient, saves operating dollars while it improves the comfort of your building, and uses smart devices to your advantage. Consider the following qualities before buying.
  • Occupancy and Vacancy Sensors. Consider buying a system that uses occupancy and vacancy sensors. The sensors control the system by distinguishing between occupied and vacant rooms and adjusting the energy use in those rooms accordingly. To do this effectively, you need a system that can distinguish between living heat sources (your employees) and non-living heat sources (office machines). The occupancy sensor also must distinguish between humans and large inanimate objects. One neat feature available in some systems is a sensor with daylight “harvesting” capabilities. These sensors adjust the building’s artificial energy use by sensing the amount of daylight coming in through the building’s windows. Then, the system adjusts the level of indoor light correspondingly.
  • Improve Office Comfort Levels. Look for a system that allows your employees to adjust the lighting levels in their office space determined on specific tasks. A system that adjusts lighting based on the time of day can also help employees maintain healthier internal body clock rhythms. Adjusting light to lower levels at closing time before completely turning off the lights is an employee safety factor.
  • Data Collection. Networked lighting systems collect data on space utilization and space occupancy. How useful the data is depends on its quality. For example, installing light sensors in every light fixture means the data quality is high (1:1 ratio). High quality data is more useful for current purposes as well as for planning future changes. You want the data to contain a high level of detail and you want the ability to act on the information after collection.
  • Optimize the Network Lighting System. You want your smart lighting system to do more than turn the lights on/off. Look for a smart lighting system that can control the HVAC system, security system, and provide access control to restricted areas of your facility. A smart system can monitor how and where and when people move throughout the facility. This feature will provide security information with respect to visitors whose access you want to restrict to certain areas of the facility. The system can limit energy use in those rooms with little activity, like large conference rooms. And, in emergencies, the system sensors can locate employees and visitors within the facility.
  • Select a System Now That Can Adapt into the Future. When you compare the systems on the market today, remember that you want something that you can adapt to future changes in technology. A wireless system, for example, will make it easier to install now and when you redesign spaces. Selecting a system now that anticipates future technology will save headaches later.

How Utility Rebates and Incentives Help Your Business

A few years ago, “going green” was all the rage, if sometimes only in theory.

Businesses across the United States made a point to sell themselves on how eco-friendly they and their products were.

Sadly, though, many of these businesses only stated what became the status quo, and few of them actually practiced what they preached

These nefarious actions made those legitimate among us look bad in the eyes of consumers. But with so many advantages and benefits to being green, it’s simply inexcusable not to try.

What’s more, utility rebates and incentives provided by the US Energy Department make going green easy, even for those who never fully followed through with their actions previously.

Because, really, all that a business has to do for more information regarding rebates, is to frequent energy.gov/savings and click on their state from the drop down menu.

For example, the results for Arizona are vast and encompass a range of commercial energy saving opportunities.

In order to find qualifications and further information, all one has to do is filter by eligibility and savings. From there, they can research ways to be more eco-friendly while saving money at the same time.

Take solar energy, for example. Over the last 10 years, California has single-handedly turned a means to conserve into a way to save.

Further, global leaders in business have lent a helping hand in legitimizing green energy.

Wal-Mart, as was reported by Forbes recently, has become a green global giant, even if their business practices are perceived as a little less than savory at times.

From the article:

Wal-Mart has installed 105 megawatts of solar panels–enough to power about 20,000 houses–on the roofs of 327 stores and distribution centers (about 6% of all their locations). That’s enough to make Wal-Mart the single biggest commercial solar generator in the country. And it intends to double its number of arrays by 2020.

Wal-Mart, among many other business leaders in the US, is changing green energy.

So while 2017 is a transition year for “going green,” businesses nationwide can still bask in the imminent glow of changing the world and consuming less. Because, in the end, earning the savings is as easy as visiting a website.