Yazi Fletcher, chief technical officer, Phoenix Products Company, outlined the benefits of LED lighting at this year’s TOC Europe exhibition.
“LED lighting is a proven technology with a payback time of two to three years,” he said. Added to this, an LED lighting system can be expected to give 19% in savings up until the year 2020.
But Mr Fletcher was quick to point out that energy savings are not the only reason to install a more efficient lighting system, there are a multitude of other benefits too.
“Standard port lights use high pressure sodium, but this doesn’t allow you to see different colours like the pure white light of LED.”
This is because sodium lighting reflects red, yellow and orange so it’s difficult to see colours at the cold end of the spectrum.
LED lighting on the other hand can be colour tuned to reflect all colours in the spectrum pretty much equally because it mimics natural daylight.
For this reason Mr Fletcher added that both cool white and warm white LED lights allow workers to feel more comfortable and less stressed.
They can also withstand high vibration environments better, do not attract as many insects and give off less light pollution.
LED lights are also more simple to dispose of because they don’t contain mercury. The fact that they need less maintenance and have a low failure rate only adds to the green factor, because standard sodium lights have a failure rate of 50% at 34,000 hours.
“LED lighting is a really high quality product to beat for these reasons,” Mr Fletcher concluded.
