Time to take Stock - LED Lighting in Retail

Lux Magazine reports:
Time to take STOCK
Retail lighting has come a long way in the last couple of years: LED payback time has shortened and expectations have risen, but end users still have to check for dodgy specs. Kathrine Anker reports:

Every time Lux brings together manufacturers, designers and end users to discuss retail lighting, things have changed dramatically since the last time. It’s not long ago that LED was a prohibitively expensive technology for some, and not good enough for others, but things have moved on pretty far since then.

Our latest retail lighting forum, in association with Microlights, got off to an optimistic start, acknowledging that a lot of education has happened. ‘I think all clients have become discerning,’ said Theo Paradise-Hirst, head of lighting design at NDYLight. ‘They’ve realised that lighting is the absolute key driver to making retail work. There is more knowledge and appreciation of colour rendering and you can have conversations with clients that you’d never have had 10 years ago about the exact colour temperature and materials.’

Adding to the optimism was a consensus that payback time for LED lighting has come down to a level that will please most finance directors. Leases can be short in retail, so a quick return on investment is more important than it is in other sectors. Three to five years appeared to be the accepted threshold for most end users around the table, including those responsible for lighting in Sainsbury’s, Harrods and John Lewis, and they all agreed that we are getting there.

From the suppliers’ perspective, the maturity of the UK lighting market is to blame for the slow climb toward the tipping point. ‘Retailers in the UK have been very switched on for a long time and market prices for conventional technology are very low,’ said John Chamberlin, sales director at Microlights. ‘Because the price point is so low in the traditional lighting market and you’re starting from a very low price point, it’s taken this long for LED solutions to pay back. But that tipping point is gone now – we’re getting under two-year paybacks in some cases.’

Hitting the tipping point where cost is no longer prohibitive means some end users can start to think about using LED luminaires not just as a secondary light source but as the main one, said lighting designer Keith Ware: ‘We’re starting to see more use of LED as the primary light. For the first time, it feels like LED is actually a credible technology, that we can start to talk to our clients about full LED schemes. Retailers are willing to go with it because they are starting to look at the whole life cycle and the payback.’Tipping point aside, payback time still depends on what you’re replacing. Alan Patton, M&E manager at B&Q, said: ‘If you’re replacing T5, they are very good already so the payback time of a retrofit will be five to seven years. You can still get your energy consumption down by switching from T5 to LED, but it’s at a cost.’

Horses for courses

Despite the LED hype, retail estates are still predominantly lit by fluorescent T8 – LEDs make up less than five per cent of fittings in retail stores, according to a recent survey conducted by BRE. And ultimately, as Phil Caton, director of PJC Light Studio, pointed out, the best system is the one that delivers. ‘If you’ve got a high ceiling you’ll struggle to get the same punch from an LED fitting as you’ll get from a metal halide, unless you significantly increase the size of the fitting – and nobody wants to see big, clunky fittings in high-end retail stores,’ Caton said.

He added: ‘We get the feedback that LED doesn’t give the same depth – the quality of light is much flatter, even when you play with contrast ratios. When there are multiple LED sources in a fitting we have the problem of fringing and shadows around the product, and dimming still gives problems with modulations, so LED won’t be the total solution for the foreseeable future.’

Theo Paradise-Hirst added: ‘Over time some LEDs don’t render colours as well. It’s not just the output, sometimes you have to be aware that there might be colour changes. If you go to galleries that are lit with LED, they look great on day one but after a while something  

MANAGING PERCEPTIONS

Light levels can get shamefully high in retail and it often falls to designers to argue for a more restrained approach. ‘Competing shops in a beauty hall don’t look at the relative brightness in the room, they just want to have the brightest shop. So light levels go up and up, completely unnecessarily and the products end up looking all bleached out,’ said Maida Hot, managing director of lighting design company GIA Equation. ‘Trying to find a balance that creates a luxurious feel is quite a challenge. Everyone puts in more, just in case.’

Most of the designers taking part in our retail lighting forum had encountered clients with excessive and unnecessary light level demands. ‘It’s all about perception,’ said Keith Ware. ‘When a client says ‘I want 1,000 lx’, that’s not a lighting brief – that’s just a statement. You need to ask, what is the lit effect you’re trying to create?’ Ware told the roundtable that his company, Dalziel and Pow, successfully convinced Primark to bring down the light level in its shops to below 1,000 lx. ‘We arranged a test with a lighting consultant to prove to Primark that they didn’t need 1,500 lx everywhere. You could bring the level down to 800-900 as a general average – of course with higher contrast on the walls and better vertical on the fixtures off the aisles. But we cheated a little bit – when we did the test we reduced the light to the level we wanted before the test started. When they arrived they said: “This level is great, now we need to reduce it.” That nailed it completely, because it made them realise that there are better ways of designing a lighting scheme to a lower lux level if you get the contrast right.’