Improve The Patients Experience By Changing Your Hospital Lighting

Patients are changing every day, and as patients change, hospitals have to change too. The costs of care are constantly changing, the role of insurance providers is changing, and there are different options for patients in regards to treatment. These factors and more are causing healthcare facilities to change the way they operate so they can be more competitive.

Lighting once seemed like only a small difference between one medical facility over the other, but it has become a major difference. Yes, lighting can be the difference in a patient choosing one medical facility over the other. In order for your medical facility to compete in the healthcare industry, you have to design your facility around the needs of your patients, visitors, employees, medical providers, etc.

When you invest in better hospital lighting, patients and your hospital staff will see better and feel better. Lighting can also be the key to speeding up the recovery and healing process. Those who are responsible for caring for the patients will be able to do their jobs better because the hospital lighting has been improved.

When your hospital installs proper lighting, patients will be able to relax, your hospital staff will become more productive and efficient at their jobs, and the doctors will be able to do their jobs easier because they will have the improved visibility they need to perform surgery and operate on patients.

In order for you to be a leader in the healthcare industry, your hospital will need to improve a variety of things, especially the ambiance because that can be the key to improving patient experience and the entire reputation of your medical facility.

Tips to Create the Perfect Hotel Lighting

When your guests book a room, you want them to feel comfortable. While comfortable beds, big-screen TVs and nice artwork all provide touches of luxury, you should always pay attention to the room’s lighting.

Make Hotel Lighting Adjustable

Your guests need to function in your hotel room much the way they would at home. Your hotel lighting needs to be bright enough for them to feel comfortable working, reading, or getting ready in the morning. Bright light can easily feel cold and impersonal, so you’ll want to keep the design flexible. Task lighting and accent sconces provide enough light without washing the colors out of the room. A central overhead light by the door and accent lighting near the bed will give your guests the opportunity to adjust the lighting to their needs.

Use Long-Lasting Bulbs

LED bulbs are one of the most sustainable lighting options available. Most bulbs last an average of 50,000 hours, so you’ll spend less time and money replacing burned out bulbs in every hotel room. Furthermore, LEDs are available in a variety of colors, from soft yellow light to bright white. No matter what type of ambience you want to create, there’s a perfect LED bulb for your hotel lighting.

Keep It Simple

Your guests want to operate the lighting in their room with minimal difficulty. This means that you should place light switches and fixtures where they make sense. An overhead light in the entryway with a switch by the door will let your guests instantly see into their room. Reading lamps or sconces with switches located within easy reach from the bed will make relaxing at night much easier.

When creating a design for your hotel lighting, consider what your guests want and what each room needs.

Daylighting and LED Lighting Go Together

Daylighting is the practice of using natural sunlight as much as possible to provide internal building lighting. The intent is to save on electricity for lighting and heating a building. Windows, skylights, and light-colored ceilings work together to allow sunlight into a room and disperse it as evenly as possible.

The windows are either south or north facing to avoid the extreme glare of the rising and setting sun. Reflective surfaces and daylight redirection devices take sunlight beams that would otherwise cause glare, and redirect them to the ceiling where the light is reflected and uniformly spread out in the room.

Because sunlight availability changes throughout the day, daylighting is integrated with artificial lighting so that as the interior natural sunlight increases, the interior artificial lighting dims to keep the overall brightness constant. Likewise, when the sunlight decreases, the artificial lighting brightens. This is accomplished by using light sensors and dimming/brightening controls.

LED lighting works best for daylighting because it puts out a white light that closely resembles sunlight (without the UV light). When the sunlight dims, the LEDs do a good job of preserving the room’s sunlit ambiance. Like natural sunlight, LED lighting acts as a stimulant to the human circadian system. This increases alertness, concentration, and focus, all of which increase worker productivity. The lighting also increases sales in retail environments because colors are more vivid, which enhances the attractiveness of goods and foods.

Finally, LEDs are among the most energy-efficient light sources available, and it only makes sense to use these to maximize the energy savings possible with daylighting. The LEDs are dimmed or even turned off when natural sunlight is sufficient illumination for the room and thus save power. Even when they’re brightened to compensate for dim sunlight, the LEDs consume minimal energy.

Why LEDs Are Ideal for Manufacturing Lighting

Not all manufacturing environments are the same. Some are less forgiving than others. In fact, some are extremely unforgiving. Cement production plants are one example. There are limestone crushing operations, milling machines, and a gigantic hot kiln that rotates. Cement powder is blown through pipes under pressure, and sometimes they leak and spray cement dust into the air. In short, the plants are noisy, full of vibration, hot (in some areas), and sometimes dusty with highly abrasive cement powder. While such an environment can be hard on workers, it’s very hard on the machines themselves.

Good lighting in such a place and in other similarly difficult manufacturing environments is critical to worker productivity and especially to their safety. Unfortunately, old technology lighting such as incandescent and fluorescent lights is innately fragile. Simply put, they are based on a filament or gas encased in a glass bulb or tube. Yes, you can place them out of “harm’s way” such as on high ceilings, but they’re not out of the reach of the intense vibration of these plants, which penetrate the walls and ceilings.

In the case of incandescent lights, most of the electricity they consume turns into heat, which makes an uncomfortable environment even more uncomfortable. In addition, these aren’t the best lights from a worker safety standpoint because they are relatively dim for the energy consumed.

If you’re the plant manager of such a facility, doesn’t it make sense to install rugged lighting that can take the heat, vibration, and other abuses? LED lighting is innately rugged because it’s solid state. It’s essentially a solid diode that emits light. There’s no glass bulbs, shells, or other fragile components. Another benefit is they last substantially longer than other types of lighting.

Unlike incandescent bulbs, LED lights aren’t primarily heat-producing devices that put out a little bit of light. Most of the electricity they consume produces light. This means you have a brightly lit facility that consumes less power for its lighting. It means a safer environment for your hard-working employees.

There are many types of LED lights. Not only can you place them high overhead, you can place smaller lights on the machines or even in the machines. Solid state LEDs resist vibration. Less heat production makes them more desirable from a fire hazard point of view.

Change Your University Lighting: Go Green, Go Better

When your university installs lighting fixtures that are energy-efficient, not only will you reduce your energy bill, you will also create a better environment for everyone. On a college campus, students walk around campus at various times of the day. You do not want your students to be afraid to walk on campus at night, this is why better lighting is so important.

When your students have to walk around campus at night, LED lighting will create a better distribution of lighting.When there are dark areas on campus, those areas will be more targeted by criminals and/or vandals. When lighting is evenly distributed, there will be fewer dark spots on campus.

No one wants to constantly look behind them because they are afraid someone will harm them. When your campus lighting is equipped with LED lighting, everyone will notice the difference in lighting. Another great thing about LED lighting is that you will be able to control the angle of your lighting, this means you will have control of placing the lighting in a corner or other spaces that may not have been lit using your previous lighting methods.

LED lights will last for a significant amount of time. These lights will last so long that your current students will have graduated and more students will come in before these light bulbs will need to be changed. You can have LED lights that will last up to seven or eight years.

Is It Time To Upgrade Your Parking Lot Lighting?

Lighting your business’s parking lot is critical in providing your employees, clients, and customers with safety. If you have a dark parking lot, you could put everyone at risk for car accidents and theft. If your business has been opened for many years, there is a good chance your business still has the same lighting in place from the first day it opened.

Over the years, it is likely your lighting is not as good as it used to be. If your lighting is not efficient, it could result in major consequences for your business. If you are unsure if your business needs to replace its parking lot lighting, we want to make you aware of some signs.

Your Lights Have To Be Changed Often

If you have to constantly change the light bulbs in your parking lot, you are likely spending an excessive amount of money that can be used elsewhere. The good thing about LED lights is that they can last for a significant amount of time. If you are tired of replacing your parking lot lights, this could be a sign that you need to choose another option for parking lot lighting.

Complaints From Customers/Employees

Do you hear from your employees and/or customers about how unsafe they feel when they are in the parking lot? Crimes do take place in parking lots, especially when there is not enough lighting. When there is not enough lighting in an area, some people usually take that opportunity to commit crimes against an unsuspecting person.

Dark Areas

When you drive around your parking lot, do you notice that some areas are brighter than others? If there are some places that are not fully lit, your business parking lot has bad lighting. When you use better lighting fixtures, especially LED lighting, you will have better lighting placement.

Two Important Benefits of LED Parking Garage Lighting

Many people consider parking garages as ugly, dark, and dangerous places. This reputation is due in large part to poor upkeep and poor lighting. It doesn’t help that commonly used lights in parking garages produce an eerie off-white color that disorients the customer. However, this can be changed by using clean reflective surfaces on the ceiling and walls and by using LED lighting. Here is how you benefit from this change:

More Attractive to Your Customers

Bright lighting elevates the mood of your customers and makes them feel safer. The feeling of safety that people experience in daylight is both real and psychological. This feeling is reproduced in parking garages brightly lit with LEDs. LED lights closely resemble daylight and therefore produce similar psychological feelings. The improved lighting also makes the area more attractive and upscale. Customers are then more inclined to come back and do repeat business.

Improves Your Customer’s Safety

Bright lighting and surveillance cameras reduce crime. The improved lighting also allows customers to see slippery areas, irregular surfaces, curbs, wheel stops, and other features that might cause slip or trip-and-fall accidents. Reduced crime and falls decreases your risk of customer lawsuits arising from crime victimization and fall injuries. Poor lighting is a common reason property owners are required to pay damages in these lawsuits.

The above benefits are further enhanced by clean, white reflective wall and ceiling surfaces. This disperses light and increases the overall illumination. The right choice of paint or surface treatment will also repel dirt and soot buildup, which diminish the garage illumination over time.

Two other benefits you’ll enjoy from LED parking garage lighting are lower energy bills from the high energy efficiency of LEDs, and reduced maintenance costs from the long operating life of LEDs.

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.

Tips for Exterior Lighting and How to Keep Safe During the Winter

As the days get shorter and the nights longer, having exterior lighting is more important than ever. Whether you own an office building or an apartment building, you need to make sure that the office workers or apartment tenants stay safe. People will be leaving work when it’s dark, and ice and snow can create dangerous situations.

Exterior lights should be placed along all walkways around your building, by steps, and near the entrance. Having lights near the entrance will make the building look more welcoming. You also want lights in the parking lot so that people can enter and leave their cars safely, and so that they can see where they are going (around one in five collisions occur in parking lots).

Lights should also be installed all around your building, especially near any entrance points. This will keep your building safe at night from intruders.

When installing exterior lighting, you need to consider a number of things. First of all, the outside surroundings usually don’t reflect light as much as indoor furniture. This can cause the light to shine heavily on one area without lighting up other areas. You want the light to cast a glow over a large swath of land. You also don’t want the lights to be too bright and end up shining through the building’s windows.

Of course, all exterior lights must be able to withstand the outdoor weather conditions such as rain, snow, heat, and frost.