Interior Lighting Which Saves Money and Increases the Productivity of Your Employees

If you’re a small business owner, you want to take advantage of any possible way to improve productivity and increase your bottom line. Every little bit makes a difference. And sometimes, small changes can have a dramatic effect. You may not expect that something small, such as switching to LED lighting would make that much difference to your business. But it does.

Saving Money with LED Lighting

To begin with, you can save quite a bit of energy in the long run by investing in LED lights from the get-go. The average lifespan of an LED light is 50,000 hours. So even if you use the LED light continuously, you won’t have to change it for at least six years.

Imagine how many regular light bulbs you would go through in that time. And you’ll get an idea of how much money you’re going to save. Sure, you might have to spend a little more in the moment but if you’re the type of business owner who looks five or ten years into the future, then you’ll see that LED is the best choice.

Increasing Productivity with LED Lighting

The other advantage of LED lighting is that it’s softer and more like regular daylight. When you work with regular incandescent or fluorescent lights, everything seems just a little bit harsh. And most regular workplaces don’t have large windows letting in the sunlight, no matter how pleasant this might be for employees. So you have to light everything electrically if your employees are going to get any work done.

Using LEDs instead of incandescent or fluorescents will just be (literally!) a lot easier on the eyes for your employees. As it is, they’re probably staring at computer and phone screens all day long, which hurts the eyes. The least you can do is arrange it so that the lighting in your offices is conducive to well-being and, eventually, productivity. Because an employee who is feeling comfortable and happy is likely to work for longer and put in his or her 100%. And this is eventually to your benefit as a business owner.

Contact us for more great tips for using LED lights in your office environment.

The Many Benefits of a Commercial Lighting Retrofit

The many ways that retrofitting your existing commercial lighting can be beneficial can also be surprising. When most people think of retrofitting their existing lighting they think of merely the energy savings that they will save. While this benefit is real and quite often saves enough money on electricity to pay for the cost of the retrofit, there are many additional benefits as well.

Safety is one of the benefits that is hard to quantify but can more than make up for the cost of the lighting upgrade. Dim, blinking, or dirty light bulbs and fixtures can create a safety hazard by hiding trip hazards, objects sitting or protruding into walkways or wet slippery floors. The better the lighting the less likely that a trip or fall accident will happen. The cost of a workers comp claim or the cost of a lawsuit from a customer will greatly outweigh the costs of upgrading your lighting. This problem can be compounded if equipment, shelving, or decorating has been changed significantly since the lighting was originally installed. Light fixtures may be blocked by equipment that wasn’t originally there when the lighting was installed, making most of the light they produce be blocked off from illuminating the areas needed.

Additionally, better lighting can improve the atmosphere in a room. A well-lit room will contribute to happier and more productive employees in addition to contributing to a better customer experience. It’s hard to put a dollar figure to this benefit but it’s clear that this benefit is real. A dim workspace becomes miserable to work in, and nobody wants to patronize an establishment that feels like it’s trying to hide something in the shadows.

One often overlooked benefit is the decrease in hassle that you gain when retrofitting your lighting. Besides the energy savings that newer bulbs provide, they also provide longer life, which equals less changing out of bulbs. Although the act of changing out a bulb seems simple enough, compound that with all of the bulbs in a large facility or building and that task can quickly become a job. Longer lasting bulbs such as LED’s practically eliminate this hassle. No more rushing to replace a bulb that went out in an area that needs to be very bright. No need to bring in equipment routinely to change out hard to reach bulbs. No more changing out working bulbs because the other ones in the area went out and you don’t want to bring in the lift next week to replace it. No more hunting down bulbs that are no longer carried by many suppliers or that are obsolete.

Bottom line, retrofitting your commercial lighting saves you money in the long run, improves your safety, improves the quality of life for your employees and customers, and simplifies a recurring problem. It’s hard to argue with that. If you are considering a commercial lighting retrofit contact us here at Relumination to see how we can help.

The Many Benefits of Motion Activated LED Lighting

LEDs are ideally suited for use with motion sensor technology. And while there are many benefits and uses of LED lighting in business settings, combining them with motion sensors expands the possibilities further. Here are five benefits:

Saves Energy

If you are already using energy-efficient LED lighting, why not get more of a good thing by having them turn off automatically when no one is using a room, and switch on when people enter? LEDs require no warm up time and have no problems with being turned on and off as people go in and out of a work area. Another benefit is there is no need for you or an employee to make sure the lights are off at the end of the day.

Increases Convenience

The problem with light switches is you have to find them in a dark room. This is especially difficult for visitors or employees unfamiliar with the room. Sometimes the elusive switches are inside the room next to the door somewhere, and sometimes they’re outside. The problem is yet more awkward when a person entering a dark room is using both hands to carry something. These problems go away with LED lighting activated with motion sensors.

Improves Safety

One way to ensure that stairwells are well-lit when people use them is leaving their lights on all the time. The same is true for outside walkways and parking lots. However, motion activated LED lighting ensures that people can watch their step where they need to while saving energy as well.

Increases the Longevity of Your Lights

Although many LEDs last 50,000 hours, turning them off when not needed further increases their working life. This means money is saved on the LED replacements and on the installation labor.

Gets Customer Attention in Retail Stores

If you want to ensure that customers notice specific product displays, motion activated lighting of the display will certainly get their attention. In fact, it will do a better job than using signs with large bold lettering, to which the public has become blind.

The above listing is just a sampling of the many benefits of LED lighting when used with motion detectors.

2 Helpful Lighting Maintenance Tips From The Pros

As a commercial property owner, it goes without saying that your building is constructed with plenty of indoor and outdoor lighting. And in order to enjoy the benefits and safety of good lighting, proper routine maintenance is required. Fortunately, unless there is a mysterious problem going on with the lighting or a repair needed, there are a couple of simple maintenance tips you can rely on to take care of lighting yourself. Let’s take a look at two lighting maintenance tips from the pros that any commercial property owner can use for more optimal lighting.

  • Look Out For Exposed And/Or Damaged Cables: This is something you especially want to pay close attention to in regard to your exterior lighting, particularly lighting that goes with your landscaping. Every once in a while, inspect the area for any exposed or damaged cables. When they are exposed, it can lead to further damage to electric wiring. If you notice exposed cables, examine them for damage before burying them back into the ground again. In the event that you aren’t certain whether or not a cable is damaged, call a professional lighting expert to take care of the issue for you.
  • Perform Routine Cleaning Tasks: Just as you would clean any other part of your building, so too should you clean your lighting fixtures, especially those outside. With a soft rag, dust off components and the bulbs and remove any dirt, debris, dust, branches, or other substances that could cause your lighting not to work optimally. Cleaning the lighting fixtures occasionally will allow you to enjoy longer-lasting lighting.

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.

Five Reasons to Use LEDs for Decorative Lighting

Decorative lighting adds visual appeal, style, and professionalism to your business establishment. It differentiates you from your plainer looking competitors. It makes your business look more successful. To make it worth your while, decorative lighting shouldn’t require excessive maintenance, become a fire hazard, or cause big increases to your energy costs. Here are five reasons LED lighting is the best choice:

Energy Efficient

Compared to other technologies such as incandescent and fluorescent lighting, an LED light converts more of its electrical input into light. Incandescent bulbs for example, produce more heat than light. To put out the same amount of illumination as an LED light, the incandescent bulb requires higher wattage. This extra power is wasted as heat. Although your money isn’t going up in smoke, it is going up in heat.

Efficient Color Production

There’s another type of efficiency that LEDs enjoy over incandescent lights. To produce a color, an incandescent light uses a filter, that is, the bulb uses glass with a translucent color such as red, that only allows red light through. The light is dim because most of the bulb’s light doesn’t pass through. This is energy inefficient. On the other hand, a red LED light only produces red light. The power going into the LED directly produces the desired color, such as red.

Safe

Because LEDs produce little heat, they don’t get hot and aren’t fire hazards. You can safely leave them on for hours. They won’t burn the fingers of anyone who handles them.

Versatile

LEDs don’t require a warm-up period. If you want them to blink, they’re perfectly suitable. They’re easily dimmed and amenable to all kinds of control schemes. You can program a controller device to turn them on and off and vary their brightness in very complicated patterns.

Rugged

An LED light is a solid state device. There’s no glass bulbs, tubes, filaments, or glowing gas. It isn’t a collection of separate parts. It’s a solid piece of material. This means it tolerates vibration and shock impacts better than other types of lighting. When using them outdoors, you needn’t worry about wind storms. This saves on maintenance costs. In addition, LED lights outlast other common forms of lighting, which further reduces the cost of maintenance.

The Power of LED Interior Lighting on Mood

LED interior lighting affects mood in two ways. The first is the psychological effects of its color on people. For example, red stimulates physical arousal. It increases the heart rate, stimulates physical action, and triggers impulse eating. For a fast food restaurant that wants customers to eat quickly to make room for more customers, red is a good color for the interior. However, too much bright red will turn off people. The best solution is using subdued shades of red as accent colors. LED lights work well for adding accent lighting to a restaurant interior. Other color choices have different effects, and choosing the right one depends on your particular type of business establishment.

The second way LED lighting affects mood is that it increases alertness and energy levels in much the same way as sunlight. The reason for this is the color components of LED lighting are nearly identical to sunshine. That’s why its overall white color resembles sunlight. However, it lacks the ultraviolet and infrared (heat) components of sunlight. This is why LED lights are used for treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD). SAD is a seasonal depression that afflicts people living in the northernmost latitudes during the winter, when there is little sunlight. LED light treatment is effective because it makes up for this sunlight deficiency.

Other uses of this effect include:

  • Classroom lighting to enhance student performance. Alertness and energy has a positive effect on mental performance.
  • Office lighting for increasing the productivity of professionals and white-collar workers. LED brightness levels are easily adjusted to accommodate the preferences of individual workers.
  • Lighting for manufacturing floors and warehouses. In addition to enhancing performance, the bright white light reduces accidents and injuries.
  • Rest stop interior lighting. Drowsy driving causes accidents. LED lighting combined with caffeine is highly effective in combating driver fatigue.
  • Store lighting. Happy people are more inclined to make purchases. This is why many stores use background music. LED lighting is yet another mood enhancer. In addition, the pure white light shows off the true colors of food products such as fruits and vegetables.

LED Lighting: Perfect for Business Signage

Many of the properties that make LEDs unique also make them ideal for business signage lighting. This includes signs on the business premises and those placed elsewhere for advertising purposes. Five of these beneficial properties are discussed next.

  • Energy-efficient. While most people are familiar with this benefit, it doesn’t make it any less true. With LED lighting on your advertising signs, you can go ahead and leave them on longer because their energy consumption is so low. LEDs use 60% less power than fluorescent lighting for the same lighting levels.
  • Longer lasting. While fluorescent signage lighting requires replacement several times per year, LEDs will run for years before requiring replacement. The maintenance savings are substantial, especially on large, difficult to access elevated signs such as highway billboards.
  • Rugged. LEDs don’t use fragile glass tubes or filaments inside glass bulbs. They are solid state devices, which means your outdoor signage is less vulnerable to bad weather such as wind storms. This significantly reduces long-term maintenance costs in many parts of the country with highly variable weather.
  • Unidirectional light. Light from LEDs don’t radiate in all directions as does light from fluorescent tubes. LEDs put out unidirectional light that travels in a single direction. This property is useful when lighting a sign with an external light. Often this consists of a light source positioned on the ground and aimed at a sign above. Most of the light emission from the LED light source reaches the sign and therefore isn’t wasted. The fuller white light also shows the sign’s true colors.
  • Low heat output. For indoor signage, this saves on air conditioning in the summer and is less of a fire risk than hot incandescent lighting.

How Exterior Illumination Easily Makes Your Hotel More Inviting

Adding exterior lighting to your hospitality venue is an easy way to create an appealing façade for your building which will draw in more customers and therefore increase revenue. Illuminating the outside of your business is the perfect way to instantly make it look warmer, more inviting, and higher in quality while still being a cost-effective improvement method.

Aesthetics

Highlighting the exterior features of your hotel including the insignia, well-manicured landscaping and greenery, cascading fountains, and available parking areas and thoroughfares automatically elevates the aesthetic quality of your establishment. When the external characteristics of the hotel are accentuated, patrons will be more likely to investigate the internal amenities and choose to stay there.

Safety

We’ve all seen horror movie scenes where the protagonists coast their stalling automobile into the dark, spooky parking lot of a sinister-looking hotel, foreshadowing the ill-fated activities that take place there. Don’t make the mistake of allowing your building to become a stereotypical Bates Motel lookalike by leaving the outside unlit and unwelcoming. No matter how appealing it may be in the daytime hours, after dusk weary travelers will pass up your venue for a brighter, more cheery option. Not to mention, a lack of lighting also presents a safety hazard, increasing the likelihood of customers and staff members to experience  painful trips and falls.

Conscientiousness

Making the investment to have exterior illumination installed at your building speaks highly of you and your establishment. Being conscientious enough to anticipate the aesthetic quality and safety advantages that outside illumination creates, makes your current and potential customers feel more confident in their decision to book a stay with your company.

Fashioning a beautiful eye-catching hospitality establishment that will be the envy of all others has never been easier. Your literal and figurative “lightbulb moment” will help you become the preferred hotel for family vacationers, business gurus, honeymooners, and adventurers of all sorts.