LED Lighting for a brighter future!

Andy Clements, Managing Director at ESP, explains how security and in particular EAP can provide Electricians with good business opportunities. As the light summer evenings give way to the long dark nights of winter, security once again comes to the fore as home and business owners focus on keeping their properties protected.  This presents new opportunities for installers, as the requirement for maintaining or upgrading security systems increases. After all, the last thing criminals want is attention being brought to their activity. Permanent lighting will illuminate and deter them. However, triggered lighting is far more likely to catch the attention of the property owner or neighbour.  The solution is the use of PIR (Passive infra-red) technology to maintain a watchful eye and provide illumination only when required. The intruder suddenly feels over exposed and risks the attention of passers-by being drawn to the scene. The choice of PIR detectors is wide and vari...

The Carbon Trust offers support and advice for companies that want to implement energy-efficiency schemes. It also runs an accredited supplier scheme. Alongside this it can offer – thanks to a partnership with Siemens Financial Services – structured finance packages which are designed so that savings exceed repayments, following an independent assessment of the energy-saving potential. Paul Smyth of Salix Finance, which was also represented in the discussion on funding for lighting projects, said that streetlighting and LED lighting is a focus for his clients, with spend on such projects amounting to £7.2m and £5.2m respectively as of year-end 2012/2013. He notes a change of emphasis in chosen lighting solutions, with LED now representing more than half of such solutions due to the cost, lumens per watt and efficiency gains. T5, in comparison, represented 48 per cent of projects in the year ending 2012/13 – for the first time, less than LED equivalents. He says Salix clients ...

Speaking at LuxLive today, Toby Marlow, general manager of sustainable development at Waitrose, revealed that all new Waitrose stores will be lit 100 per cent by LEDs from now on. Marlow described how the retailer’s Ipswich store has undergone a complete LED refit covering office, retail and warehouse space – resulting in an overall efficacy of just seven watts per square metre, reducing running costs by up to 42 per cent. ‘Moving towards LED has been a step-change in design,’ Marlow said. ‘We can now position light where we want it and make greater use of contrasts. Efficiency and colour rendering has improved dramatically and we’re now up to 130 lumens per watt,’ he told the audience at the event. Marlow says the redesign is between 40 per cent to 42 per cent more efficient than its equivalent T5 scheme – savings that would not have been possible just a year ago. LED lighting first got a foothold in refrigerators and freezers, because LEDs work well in t...