Keeping up with the speed of light(ing)
October 1st 2007

With new light sources coming onto the market almost every week, all making attention-grabbing claims about performance, it can be difficult for building operators to keep track. Ian Fursland of The Lamp Company considers the problem and suggests a solution

Of all the items of energy consuming equipment in a building, light sources probably have the highest turnover – and the highest potential to confuse because there is now so much choice.However, this high turnover also presents a great opportunity to introduce energy savings by going a step further than just replacing like with like. Re-lamping with a newer but compatible design of lamp could save significant amounts of energy.

It's not that long ago since the predominant fluorescent lighting was cold, flickering, short-lived T12 lamps and when the T8 linear fluorescent came along, the advantages over the T12 in terms of light quality, light output, energy efficiency and useful life were obvious, especially in high frequency versions.

In parallel with these developments, compact fluorescent lamps have evolved from big, chunky, expensive items into a huge selection of different types.Many of these are suitable for replacing existing incandescent lamps, and many are not.

High intensity discharge (HID) lamps such as high pressure sodium and metal halide lamps have experienced a similar evolution.

Again,many of these newer lamps are suitable for replacing existing HID lamps – but not all.

So many building operators now have a great opportunity to upgrade their existing lighting to higher light output, better colour rendering, increased energy efficiency and lower cost of ownership simply by retrofitting lamps.The tricky bit is to identify the best way doing it.

This was certainly the case for florists Charlotte Rose, which was looking at replacing an inefficient lighting system that used mainly incandescent light sources.

The proposed solution was to retain the existing fittings and replace the incandescent light sources with energy saving alternatives.To determine just how cost-effective this would be the data was entered into The Lamp Company's 'cost of ownership'program,which predicted savings of up to £850 per year through improved energy consumption.The florists will also reduce their carbon output by 9.23 tonnes over the lifetime of the bulbs.

Suitable lamps were sourced through The Lamp Company's database of 80,000 lamps and installed with the minimum of disruption to the business.These included 15,000 hour screw cap CFLs with reflectors, supplemented by 2- pin halogen lamps for display areas.

"I'm thrilled with the results" said business owner Charlotte Snowdon, "the new bulbs match the existing fittings perfectly and look exactly the same as the old ones. I've already noticed real cost savings to the bottom line of the business and I'd say they're performing just as well as the previous ones in terms of light in the shop." In large buildings the opportunities are often greater but the range of lamp types is likely to be wider.The lighting will also be serving a broader range of tasks so this will have to be taken in to account as well.

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