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If
you talk to someone who hasn’t seen the new advances in LED
light technology, they’ll invariably say something like,
“yea…but the light’s not quite there yet.” They have a
point…3 years ago. It WAS the Achilles heel of LED
lighting. We loved the savings in energy and the lack of
extremely toxic materials (mercury and phosphorus of CFL’s)
but the light quality was an issue. It was very bright,
very white, and harsh. That’s an issue. We all want to
save significantly but we don’t want to wear sunglasses when
looking at the light. We can finally move past the quality
of LED light color with our new color tuning.
We
can color tune the light quality to any Kelvin which is
impressive. Kelvin is a measure of color temperature that
indicates the hue of a specific type of light source. It’s
as specific as you can get to the color of light. We advise
up narrowing the range to white light (good for industrial,
street lights, warehousing, etc); daylight (office space,
hospitals, residential, outdoor lighting, etc); and finally,
warm light which has a yellow hue when compared to daylight
(ideal for residential, galleries, and locations that need
softer tones). Of course we can show you exact samples in
your actual location which is very important as the eyes are
the final judge. We recommend being conservative when
choosing light qualities by moving up the scale to a warmer
color but again, nothing beats having actual lights in the
space of question. We’ll have the Color Finder up on the
site for an on screen representation of the colors of light
to better help you. So that’s the color of the light…what
about the actual mechanism of the lamp as compared to the
incandescent or fluorescent bulbs?
It
gets even better. LED are solid state by design. This is
huge. Solid state essentially means that the electronic
components are entirely built from solid materials. Drop a
light bulb. Actually, don’t do it but you know what will
happen. It will break. We’ve all seen it and probably have
been responsible for a few breaks our selves. Incandescent
lights will generally give off a pop (that’s the vacuum
pressure) but result in just a mess to clean up and of
course the complete loss of that bulb. A fluorescent or CFL
(compact fluorescent light) are a different story. Yes,
they break and you lose 100% of the bulb’s ability to
function but that’s actually the good news. There is likely
very toxic chemicals that are now leaving residue everywhere
around the breakage and due to fine powery nature of the
residue, it travels a while. Why does this matter? That
power is incredibly toxic and dangerous to humans and all
livings things for that matter. You’re supposed to have a
licensed Hazmat entity clean up these spills and they’re
very expensive. If the light breaks onto your merchandise,
this bill can grow significantly. There’s also the question
of disposal. You can’t just throw this breakage into the
trash due to the phosphorus and mercury that’s used in the
housing.
Now
drop an LED light. You’re probably fine. It’s solid
state. There are no tubes or glass elements to break. It’s
a solid piece of material. It doesn’t heat up either which
prevents a great deal of wear and tear over the life of the
LED (estimated at 50,000 hours). Most of the failure
resulting to incandescent bulbs is actually from the
incessant onslaught of heat. fluorescents are equally
flawed in that the mechanism to actually create the light is
pretty sophisticated (excited particles of a confined gas).
Solid state is always to go if available and this is a huge
contributing factor to both the qualify of the LED lights
but the resulting savings. |
