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Author: Kimberly Quang

Commercial warehouse lighting must take a number of factors into account to be truly cost effective and functionally supportive of operations and labor. Foremost on the list of consideration is lighting levels. Visibility is necessary to both ensure smooth process flow and worker safety. In commercial warehouse lighting, brightness should be directly proportional to the activity within an area.

Most lighting in commercial warehouses requires equal attention to vertical as well as horizontal foot candle densities because both workers and equipment may be moving supplies either vertically up ramps or horizontally across floor space. It also helps to be able to control the level of lighting in a commercial warehouse in order to maximize energy efficiency. The type of lights you chose for your warehouse is also very important. Some types of light render color more effectively than others, and operations such as assembly line work often require a color rendering index (CRI) of close to 100 (CRI of daylight).

Commercial warehouse lights are often called “high bay lights” or “low bay lights” because they hang from the ceiling of a facility. Bay lights can be High Pressure Sodium, Metal Halide, or Fluorescent lamps. Newer MH lighting fixtures have recently emerged in the market, along with a number of T5 and T8, and parabolic commercial warehouse lights we will examine in greater detail at a later date. For the meantime, the advantages and drawbacks of each type of commercial warehouse lighting fixture is itemized below, along with some suggestions on how each can be most effectively used by an industrial organization.

Types of HID High Bay Lighting:

High Pressure Sodium

High Pressure Sodium fixtures were the preferred form of lighting in commercial warehouses for many years. Not only did they offer the highest lumens per watt efficiency, they also featured the longest lamp life (approximately 25,000 hours). This offers companies looking to weather the recession cost effectively the advantage of a onetime equipment purchase that won’t deteriorate or need constant replacement. Although many people find the yellowish light they produce annoying, they are still used extensively in areas where color rendering is not important. RLLD Commercial Lighting’s selection of high bay HPS lights feature a wide range of wattages and ballast options to accommodate warehouses of all sizes.

Metal Halide

Most people doing assembly line work prefer to work under the bright white light of Metal Halide commercial warehouse lights. The CRI of an MH lamp is much higher than that of high pressure sodium. In the past many organizations found them too expensive, however, as a long term investment. Lamp life tends to be only 7,500 hours or so, making frequent replacements inevitable. Also, lumens per watt efficiency tended to be significantly lower than HPS fixtures, making MH more costly to operate.

Recent developments in technology have changed this to a certain extent. Pulse start MH high bays feature up to 110 lumens per watt efficiency-not quite as high as HPS, but certainly bright enough to provide a well-lit vertical cube and effective downlighting over horizontal work areas. They also feature longer lamp life and are rapidly gaining popularity as a recession proof source of high quality lighting in areas that require color definition and brightness.

Fluorescent High Bays

Fluorescent high bay warehouse lights burn significantly cooler than HID fixtures. In plants where the air tends florescent warehouse lights can lower HVAC costs. Fluorescent fixtures also render colors more effectively than HID light sources, and they use far less power than HID fixtures. For example, a 35watt fluorescent high bay can produce equivalent lighting levels to a 400 watt HID fixture. Although the light is less controllable and intense, it tends to be more evenly distributed. Fluorescent commercial warehouse lights are ideal for lighting large areas of floor space where heavy traffic requires clear visibility without glare or shadow.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/lighting-fixtures-for-commercial-warehouses-627278.html

About the Author
rlldesign.com. For more information on Commercial Warehouse Lighting and Commercial Lighting Fixtures Made in the USA visit us online.

Originally posted 2011-07-10 06:13:43. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Empire Lighting Resources has just completed a lighting upgrade for All County Music of Tamarac, FL. The owner complained of high electric bills and that the store was dark and didn’t show his products in their best light.

Empire Lighting Resources replaced 27 outdated parabolic fixtures in the main store with energy efficient fixtures. Wattage consumption dropped from 192 to 80 per fixture while footcandle readings doubled. This was made possible by using ELR’s VIZ-A-LITE High Vision fluorescent lamps. In addition, Empire Lighting Resources upgraded an additional 60 existing four lamp fixtures using standard fluorescents and two magnetic ballasts in the repair and storage areas with two VIZ-A-LITE High Vision fluorescents and one electronic ballast.

By instituting these upgrades, ELR has reduced the lighting energy consumption, including heat load reduction used by All County Music by over 60%. This translates to a savings of over $4,000 per year.

The employees were thrilled with the new look of the store and the owner happily stated after completion, “you changed the look of my business from regular television to HD”.

Originally posted 2009-10-02 14:18:52. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

FPL downplays the impact of lighting on electric bills, with a page on its Web site that says “lighting is not typically a major user of energy in most homes [the average cost is $70 a year].” An energy calculator on the same page shows it costs $64.80 a month to burn 15 100-watt bulbs 12 hours a day. Comparable lighting produced by CFL bulbs would cost around $15 a month.

I went around my house the other day and counted 33 incandescent bulbs.

Forget the mall. This holiday season, I’m headed to the hardware store.

Michael Mayo’s column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at mmayo@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4508.

From Sun Sentinel - 12/21/08

President-elect Barack Obama has talked about turning the White House into the Green House and making energy efficiency in federal buildings and public schools a top priority.

“Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that,” Obama said in a Dec. 6 address. “We will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy efficient … by replacing heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs.”

Light bulbs? I had this picture in my mind of Obama and Al Gore standing on ladders, fiddling with every fixture around Washington, D.C.

I mean, how much can really be done by changing light bulbs?

Turns out a lot.

Just ask Giacomo Dresseno, longtime chef-owner of Primavera Restaurant in Oakland Park. Facing an economic downturn in a business with a slim profit margin, Dresseno decided to do something when his FPL bills climbed to nearly $3,000 a month last year.

He went green, switching hundreds of incandescent bulbs to the latest in Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs) and Light Emitting Diode (LED) bulbs. He also got rid of some inefficient refrigerators.

The bottom line: His latest electric bill was $1,400, a 50 percent drop from its peak.

“It’s saving me $15,000 a year,” Dresseno said as he showed me the new lighting around the restaurant.

That’s a lotta pasta.

“It seems like a lot of work, but it’s not,” Dresseno said. “The technology is there, and it’s not that expensive.”

The only drawback: CFL bulbs contain a small amount of mercury, so if the bulb breaks it can be a hazard and a hassle.

Dresseno said he has spent less than a thousand dollars on the upgrades, an investment that paid for itself in less than a month. He showed me the new bulbs in the kitchen, with eight fluorescent fixtures drawing only 64 watts each, compared to 240 watts used by the old ones.

He showed off the women’s bathroom, where 45 watts’ worth of LED bulbs does the job that 480 watts of incandescent bulbs used to do.

Dresseno spoke about the ripple effects. “Feel this,” he said, as he unscrewed an LED bulb with his bare hand. It was warm to the touch, about 120 degrees, but it didn’t burn like an incandescent bulb. All those bulbs producing less heat means the air conditioning doesn’t kick on as much.

So maybe there is something to this, something simple and concrete most businesses and homes can do right now without installing expensive solar panels or building a windmill on the front lawn.

“I feel like it’s politically correct, it’s the right thing to do,” said Dresseno, originally from Lake Como, Italy. “And it puts more money in my pocket and less in FPL’s.”

Now that’s change we can believe in. Saving the planet is one thing, but getting revenge on our favorite utility by denting FPL’s bottom line should make this irresistible for South Floridians.

Originally posted 2009-04-18 09:29:31. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Time.com

By Michael Grunwald
Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

This may sound too good to be true, but the U.S. has a renewable-energy resource that is perfectly clean, remarkably cheap, surprisingly abundant and immediately available. It has astounding potential to reduce the carbon emissions that threaten our planet, the dependence on foreign oil that threatens our security and the energy costs that threaten our wallets. Unlike coal and petroleum, it doesn’t pollute; unlike solar and wind, it doesn’t depend on the weather; unlike ethanol, it doesn’t accelerate deforestation or inflate food prices; unlike nuclear plants, it doesn’t raise uncomfortable questions about meltdowns or terrorist attacks or radioactive-waste storage, and it doesn’t take a decade to build. It isn’t what-if like hydrogen, clean coal and tidal power; it’s already proven to be workable, scalable and cost-effective. And we don’t need to import it.

This miracle juice goes by the distinctly boring name of energy efficiency, and it’s often ignored in the hubbub over alternative fuels, the nuclear renaissance, T. Boone Pickens and the green-tech economy. Clearly, it needs an agent. But it’s a simple concept: wasting less energy. Or more precisely, consuming less energy to get the same amount of heat for your shower, light for your office and power for your factory. It turns out to be much less expensive, destructive and time-intensive to reduce demand through efficiency than to increase supply through new drilling or new power plants. A nationwide push to save “negawatts” instead of building more megawatts could help reverse our unsustainable increases in energy-hogging and carbon-spewing while creating a slew of jobs and saving a load of cash.

Now this may sound like Jimmy Carter’s 30-year-old plea for us to turn down the heat and put on sweaters or like an eco-lecture nagging us to turn off lights, drive less and otherwise change our behavior to save energy. It would be nice if we did, but that’s conservation, not efficiency. We don’t have to sacrifice comfort or change routines to get efficient. Doing less with less may be admirable, but efficiency is about doing the same or more with less. And studies by groups as diverse as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and even the National Petroleum Council have identified efficiency as the way to start addressing our energy and climate crises. In fact, we’ve already started; the Alliance to Save Energy calculates that without the efficiency gains we’ve made since the last energy crisis, in 1973, our economy would use nearly 50% more energy today. That’s more than we get from oil, twice what we get from coal or natural gas and six times what we get from nuclear plants.

But we could save much more. A McKinsey study found that a global effort to boost efficiency with existing technologies could have “spectacular results,” eliminating more than 20% of world energy demand by 2020. Efficiency guru Amory Lovins argues that today’s best techniques could save the U.S. half our oil and gas and three-fourths of our electricity. That would mean no more imports from the Middle East, lower utility bills for everyone and a big step off our path toward a hotter planet. Honeywell CEO Dave Cote brags that widespread adoption of just his own company’s efficiency products could slash U.S. energy use 20%. “There’s a huge amount of low-hanging fruit,” he says.

There are two basic ways to save energy without deprivation or daily effort. We can use more efficient machinery, like fuel-efficient cars that guzzle less gas, or those pigtailed compact fluorescent lightbulbs that use 75% less power than traditional bulbs, or state-of-the-art refrigerators that are three times as efficient as 1973 models. We can also use machinery more productively. That can be as simple as insulating pipes and ducts, caulking doors and windows and otherwise weatherizing our homes to avoid heating our attics and the outdoors. Or installing motion sensors and programmable thermostats that turn out lights and air conditioners when no one’s in the room. President-elect Barack Obama noted on the campaign trail that if we all just properly inflated our tires and maintained our engines, we could save as much oil now as new offshore drilling would produce by 2030. And since buildings devour two-thirds of our power, commercial and industrial operations can weed out even more waste through green construction and automated systems that practically import power as needed. “We’ve hit rock bottom in our addiction to fossil fuels,” says Ian Bowles, Massachusetts energy and environmental affairs secretary. “We need an intervention, and energy efficiency is it.”

Originally posted 2009-05-02 13:50:01. Republished by Blog Post Promoter