New Premise for David Trubridge

David Trubridge Design has at last moved into its own brand new premises. The building was designed by David to incorporate our workshop, design studio and, most exciting of all, a showroom. We have never had this public space up until now, nor has there been a place where all our lights could be seen in one place, particularly the big showpiece ones. In fact, there can be very few similar venues in the world where you can meet the designer and his team in their studio, see a display of the actual designs themselves, and watch the fabrication happening out the back through a glass window. The lights are sold in most of the great cities of the world, and have been featured in all the main international design magazines, and here they are in a sophisticated gallery in Whakatu, a tiny village in Hawkes Bay. A prominent feature of the new space is a solid wood staircase, also designed by David, that has caused a few ripples locally. Some of David's woodblock prints and photographs are displayed on the walls for sale. New products such as jewellery, small boxes, carpets made by Cronz, and fabric designs developed in partnership with Hemptech are all in the pipeline and will be added in the next few months and some will be launched on the day. We have longer term plans to develop the place as a centre of innovative thought based around design workshops and community events. Please come and share this with us at our opening!

  

 

Street Light Costs 

Converting HPS, MH, mercury vapour, or incandescent street lights to LEDs incurs a capital cost, but this can be recouped over the lifetime of the lights. LEDs have an estimated lifetime five times longer than conventional HPS or MH lamps, and energy savings of 35% or more. These efficiencies mean that payback periods for LED street lights can currently be as low as 4.4 years (Ann Arbor, no date). Because the entire street luminaire (see below), not just the lamp, is typically replaced when converting conventional street lights to LED street lights, jurisdictions may reduce installation time and avoid warranty issues. More expensive LED street lighting systems include dimmers or motion sensors, but can dramatically decrease costs by reducing energy consumption and maintenance costs even further.

•  Use the following to calculate Total Cost of Ownership:
•  Price of the initial luminaire installation
•  Replacement costs of bulbs of ballasts (for HPS and MH street lighting systems) versus any replacement LED arrays or drivers
•  Maintenance costs (mostly labour)
•  Electricity consumption
• Disposal costs (including mercury recovery for HPS, metal halide or mercury vapour lamps)

Other economic benefits of LED street lamps include safety factors such as improved visibility, lower susceptibility to vandalism, and reduced likelihood of bulb outage, which can increase the potential for accidents.

Installation Costs

A significant barrier to greater use of LED street lights is their high upfront cost – especially when an existing fixture would not otherwise be replaced. Using LED street lights for new lighting projects has a much shorter payback period than do retrofit projects. Most LED retrofit projects involve replacement of the luminaire, which includes the fixture, LED array, and driver. Installers in Raleigh, North Carolina observed that “[LED] fixtures were lighter, more balanced, and easy to install” (PE 2009). Alternatively, some companies offer LED street lighting retrofit kits that can be installed without replacing the entire fixture.

However, purchasers are advised to be wary of LED retrofit products from less established manufacturers, since existing fixtures that are not designed for LED bulb use can exacerbate heating problems, leading to shorter bulb lifespan and quicker lumen depreciation. In LED street light pilot programs, costs for LED arrays vary widely according to vendors, wattage, features, and date of purchase. One newspaper conducted an internet search for LED street lights in June 2009 and reported published costs ranging from $235-1300 (Incalcaterra 2009). The prices quoted in Table 1 below do not take into account any discounts available through bulk purchases or negotiated agreements. Prices have decreased substantially since the initial release of LED street light technology, while efficacy has steadily improved. A 2008 study prepared for the US Department of Energy reported that overall the performance of LED luminaires is advancing in light output per chip at a rate of approximately 35% annually, with costs decreasing at a rate of 20% annually” (Navigant 2008).

One of the most compelling benefits of LED street lights is their longer operational life and the reduced maintenance costs. LEDs are estimated to last a decade, although warranties for LED luminaires typically last three to ten years. Most projects assume LED lifetimes of 50,000-100,000 hours compared to 8,000-24,000 hours for HPS and metal halide street lamps.

Ann Arbor’s pilot street light program reported that “maintenance savings alone are sufficient to make LED fixtures cheaper on a lifecycle basis than conventional fixtures” (Ann Arbor, no date). Banff, Canada estimates a 93% reduction in maintenance costs (Banff 2007b).

The maintenance costs of LEDs can be reduced further if the luminaires are connected to remote monitoring systems (RMSs) (CCI 2009). The City of Los Angeles, which maintains the second largest municipal street lighting system in the US, is connecting its network of LED street lights to an RMS that tracks real-time performance data. “Equipment failures are tracked, logged and synchronised with …maintenance work orders” (CCI 2009).

Similarly, LEDs can reduce the maintenance costs of traffic signals and exit signs, since the incandescent lamps they are replacing typically last up to about 8,000 and 5,000 hours, respectively.

Energy Savings

LED street lights are increasingly being combined with technologies that can dim their lights during dusk and dawn or shut down the lights using a timer or motion detector. These remote power management systems can significantly reduce energy consumption. LED street lights have very low power requirements, so they can be easily powered by a localized renewable energy system such as a small solar panel or wind turbine. This makes them useful in remote locations and allows them to be installed without cutting pavement, which dramatically reduces installation costs.

Because LEDs are very long-lasting, local governments can reduce the energy needed to manufacture and transport these products. They even reduce the amount of vehicle fuel that is burned- often diesel- when street lights are serviced because they require very little maintenance.

LEDs are less fragile than most conventional lamps and therefore are less susceptible to breakage due to vandalism or vibration (from, e.g., earthquakes, wind, or rain). LEDs are also safer to handle during installation because they are less likely to shatter and are not as hot as incandescent and HID bulbs. In addition, LEDs do not emit UV radiation when lit (unlike many HID street lamps).

Disposal Savings

HPS, metal halide, mercury vapour, and induction lamps, which are commonly used for commercial exterior lighting applications, contain mercury. Consequently, they typically must either be recycled to recover the mercury and other components or disposed of as hazardous waste. Either option adds to their total operational costs, whereas LEDs do not contain any hazardous substances and may be disposed of at no additional cost. Most of the pilot tests we reviewed did not include recycling/disposal costs associated with mercury-containing street lamps in their cost analysis, and there is little data available documenting lamp recycling costs to large volume purchasers such as municipalities.

From the seasoned business traveller to families on vacation, today’s hotel guests are well-versed in the range of lodging options available in the marketplace. Before they arrive for check-in, they check out amenities and services, and comparison shop for lodging in virtually any destination. Whether working away from home or planning an exotic getaway, guests seek properties that measure up to cultivated lifestyle expectations.

Hospitality is all about creating memorable travel experiences, with top-tier services and surroundings that win guest loyalty. Good lighting is a key component in creating those surroundings. From the welcoming atmosphere of a lobby to flexible guest room lighting to the subdued glow of an intimate restaurant, the right light creates a backdrop for a pleasant stay. Yet poor lighting can be a common guest complaint. To keep them coming back, it’s crucial to get lighting right the first time—and make it easy to maintain. For more than 100 years Philips has been providing products uniquely suited to improving the hospitality environment—from televisions to energy efficient lighting solutions. Let our expertise in hospitality help you create spaces that delight.

To be a leader in today’s competitive marketplace, hoteliers need to focus on the importance of ambiance, well-being and sustainability to address the critical issues of the guest experience, the brand and to meet your financial goals. Lighting can support these three key factors and help you transform your property in meaningful and innovative ways.

Ambiance: Welcoming and inviting spaces can engage guests in a variety of activities. The use of lighting solutions to enrich their surroundings can elevate guests’ moods and set the scene for a memorable hotel stay.

Well-Being: Comfortable, well-balanced spaces support the physical and emotional comfort of your guests. Efficient, well-balanced lighting systems can improve the guest experience and boost your bottom line.

Sustainability: Employing systems that reduce a property’s environmental impact builds a positive image, enhances guest relations, and saves dollars on energy use and maintenance. Today’s guests are conscious of the environment and care about how you operate your property—they want to know who you are as much as what you have to offer. Our lighting products offer some of the highest efficiencies and longest life of any available today. Philips is committed to innovative solutions for reducing a hotel’s environmental “footprint” and reducing energy use—while remaining cost-effective.

Choosing the right lighting solution can help you achieve the desired mix of ambiance, well-being and sustainability.

Ensure that each guest’s first impression is a positive one. Lighting serves as the backdrop for creating that memorable initial experience. It sets the scene for a successful hotel stay, and helps reinforce the intent of varied settings. Outdoors, architectural lighting can turn the hotel into a prominent landmark. Inside, the use of accent, or focal lighting can highlight signature elements, creating an inviting atmosphere and distinguishing your property from the competition. Scene-setting lighting design and colourful accents in the lobby communicate “you are welcome” to arriving guests. At the reception desk, bright light provides confidence and orientation. In guest rooms, flexible lighting scenes offer the option of bright, task light—or diffused, restful light—to provide your guests with an experience that meets their individual needs.

Making guests feel comfortable starts by allowing them to move freely within a visually appealing environment. Well-lit surroundings can improve comfort and confidence levels. At every turn, guests should feel confident and find opportunities to make a space their own. Flexible lighting enables guests and staff to adjust each environment to suit varied tasks. In offices and conference rooms, efficient, flexible lighting can adjust to varying working conditions to boost concentration and motivation; in the guest room, energizing and relaxing light can help the body adjust and increase comfort levels. In bathrooms, bright light revitalises while presenting a hygienic impression.

Branding and Company Responsibility

As today’s hospitality climate continues to change with a focus on environmentally responsible initiatives, choosing sustainable lighting solutions for your properties can build brand loyalty among guests. Consumers increasingly make purchase decisions based on an organisation’s environmental stewardship. Investing in Philips energy-efficient lamps, ballasts and systems that reduce your property’s environmental impact can pay dividends worth even more than the energy savings. Such investment can earn respect from customers and their willingness to become repeat guests.

Because hotels operate 24-7, even small gains in efficiency can lead to significant savings. Replacing outdated lighting systems with more efficient, environmentally friendly solutions will reduce energy consumption and disposal costs. Selecting lighting components that perform better over time also means fewer lamp replacements and disruptions to hotel operations. Working with fewer lamp types and standardising wattages can reduce complexity, making maintenance more manageable and less costly.

Reducing operating costs through the installation of energy efficient solutions can be measured using financial metrics like revenue per available room (RevPAR) or average daily room rate (ADR).

As noted by Energy Star, “On average, America’s 47,000 hotels spend $2,196 per available room each year on energy. This represents about 6 percent of all operating costs. Through a strategic approach to energy efficiency, a 10 percent reduction in energy consumption would have the same financial effect as increasing the average daily room rate (ADR) by $0.62 in limited-service hotels and by $1.35 in full-service hotels.”

Citizens in Raleigh, N.C. express feeling safer in municipal structures that have switched to LED lighting, according to a new survey conducted by Mindwave Research. With the results
of this survey, the "LED City" initiative in Raleigh has proven to have benefits beyond energy efficiency.

The survey asked 200 people about their perceptions of safety and other aspects of a municipal garage in Raleigh. Both men and women expressed feeling significantly safer after the installation of LED fixtures: the number of respondents who rated the garage as "very safe" increased by 76% after the LED fixtures were installed. "LED technology provides a clear benefit to municipal infrastructure, as well as to the citizens it serves," said Charles Meeker, mayor of Raleigh, "This survey shows that LEDs can do more than improve light quality. In addition to the proven environmental and energy efficiency benefits the city has already documented, the survey shows that LEDs' bright white light can help improve public feelings of safety in city spaces." The survey also measured respondents' ratings of lighting quality and cleanliness in the municipal garage. After the installation of LED lighting, 86% of respondents rated the lighting quality of the garage as "excellent" -- a 258% increase over pre-installation responses. Seventy-six percent of respondents rated the cleanliness of the parking facility as "excellent" after LED installation versus 58% before the LEDs were installed.

In the coming year, Raleigh plans to continue its "LED City" initiative by creating a "living laboratory" of LED light use throughout the city, including pedestrian and walkway lighting. The purpose of the initiative is to evaluate energy-efficient infrastructures. The announcement of the initiative was hailed by Kateri Callahan, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) as "a milestone toward large-scale adoption of clean, energy-efficient technologies." Callahan stated, "Raleigh's progressive commitment to becoming the first 'LED City' will no doubt serve as a model for other cities seeking to improve energy consumption and reduce negative impacts on the environment."

New generation LED lights offer significant safety advantages to parking lots, buildings, and other city infrastructure ... they're cleaner, greener, and last for over a decade, so they produce less landfill and contain none of the mercury found in fluorescent lighting.

Cost

Although LED's typically have a much higher purchase price, they are far more energy-efficient and longer lasting than their conventional counterparts which leads to lower total costs when factoring in electricity savings and reduced maintenance and disposal costs.

Exit Sign Costs

Currently, LED’s are far more cost efficient than incandescent and fluorescents. They are available in the a variety of styles (including stencil, matrix and edge-lit models) and price levels. In the short term, it may be cheaper to continue using incandescent bulbs in existing incandescent-lit exit signs. However, it is more cost-effective to replace existing incandescent and fluorescent-lit exit signs with new LED exit signs or to upgrade them using an LED retrofit kit.

Energy and Global Warming

Incandescent exit signs typically contain two 15- or 20-watt bulbs that draw 30-40 watts in total, whereas LED exit signs consume as little as less than one watt and no more than 10 watts. Since exit signs are lit all year around, 24 hours per day, each LED exit sign retrofit can save about 300kwh, preventing the release of half a ton of CO2 annually. Replacing incandescent-lit exit signs with new LED signs or retrofitting existing signs to use LED lamps is one of the easiest and most cost effective energy efficiency retrofits available to public and commercial facilities. Fluorescent lamps are another common bulb used in exit lighting, and although more efficient than its incandescent counterpart, they still use up to 10 times more energy than LED exit signs.

Hazardous Substances, Health and Safety

Incandescent signs, which contain lamps that typically have a rated life of 500 to 5000 hours, are likely to become partially or fully unlit more often than LED exit signs, creating safety hazards for building occupants during emergencies, and risking fines by fire marshals. Frequent bulb changing poses occupational risks for workers who must climb ladders to remove fragile glass bulbs that may contain lead solder in their bases. Lead is a known neurotoxin and causes learning and developmental disabilities. Fluorescent lamps used to light exit signs generally have a rated life of 5000 to 10000 hours, which is longer than most incandescent lamps but still far shorter than LED’s, which can last 25 years or more. Replacing fluorescent lamps can expose workers and occupants to mercury, a persistent and bio-accumulative toxic chemical known to cause damage to the brain, nervous system and heart of humans and animals. Mercury can be released during lamp manufacture, storage, transportation, installation, recycling or disposal.

End of Life Management

A typical incandescent exit sign bulb lasts just 500-5000 hours (about 1 – 6 months) and must be replaced about twice per year. In comparison, red and green LED exit sign lamps typically have a rated life of 50,000 to 200,000 hours (6 – 25 years, and some with a 25 year warranty). At the very minimum, 10 incandescent bulbs are disposed of for every one LED required to light the same exit sign.

Surprisingly to many, the true reliability and lifetime of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting systems is currently unknown. Even worse, lumen maintenance values of LED devices are widely used as a proxy for the lifetime of an LED lighting system, which is misleading since light degradation or lumen maintenance is but one component of the reliability of a luminaire. For many manufacturers this approach cannot simply be ascribed to overly ambitious marketing efforts, but rather to dependence on anecdotal numbers in the absence of real data. In addition, we can impute simple ignorance in taking specifications at face value which may or may not live up to claims. It isn't just about the LED. Good LEDs can be incorporated into poorly engineered products and turn the Methuselah of lighting into the exponent of “live fast, die young.” The promise of LED lifetime is often presented in terms of hours and years but with little background data to support anything beyond vacuous promises. The statement of 100,000 hours of LED luminaire lifetime has given way to the realisation that there is little consistency, very little published data, and few hard facts around so-called luminaire lifetime numbers. The situation is better at the LED package level, where reputable manufacturers have thousands of hours of data under varying conditions.

But this is not enough. To manufacturers and specifiers in the solid-state lighting (SSL) community, the dawning realisation is that we need to work together towards understanding the issues surrounding true lifetime and reliability. We need to begin by cataloguing such failures and developing good models for underlying failure mechanisms. This process of understanding and explanation is very common in technological progress. Steam engines existed long before deep understanding of thermodynamic processes. With LEDs, we have a substantial head-start on the underlying physics and many years of experience in both lighting and semi-conductors as well as reliability of related products. There is no reason not to begin this journey and every reason to start. We will figure this out, find reliability methods and metrics, and learn the underlying root causes of failure. But without data, experiments and models, it is all conjecture. We need a program to drive to reliability metrics.

This guide is a set of recommendations for reporting and demonstrating reliability in terms of luminaire product lifetime. These recommendations have been developed by a working group under the U.S. Department of Energy Solid State Lighting program. This group is under the guidance of the SSL Quality Advocates oversight committee, a joint body of DOE and the Next Generation Lighting Industry Alliance (NGLIA). The reliability and lifetime working group is composed of members of the NGLIA as well as other experts in reliability, lighting, and LED technology. As such, this guide is not an accepted international standard. Rather, it is meant to provide standards bodies with recommendations for their work in supporting the needs of the SSL community. These standards organisations will ultimately determine the details of the methods to measure and report the reliability of SSL luminaire products.

Cost

Although LED's typically have a much higher purchase price, they are far more energy-efficient and longer lasting than their conventional counterparts which leads to lower total costs when factoring in electricity savings and reduced maintenance and disposal costs.

Exit Sign Costs

Currently, LED’s are far more cost efficient than fluorescents. They are available in the a variety of styles (including stencil, matrix and edge-lit models) and price levels. In the short term, it may be cheaper to continue using fluorescent exit signs. However, it is more cost-effective to replace existing fluorescent-lit exit signs with new LED exit signs. The real savings come from greatly reduced maintenance costs.

Energy and Global Warming

Fluorescent exit signs typically contain two 10- or 15-watt bulbs that draw 20-30 watts in total, whereas LED exit signs typically consume around 4 watts. Since exit signs are typically lit all year around, 24 hours per day, each LED exit sign can save about 140kwh, preventing the release of around half a ton of CO2 annually. Replacing fluorescent exit signs with new LED signs  is one of the easiest and most cost effective energy efficiency upgrades available to public and commercial facilities.