For businesses and government facilities looking to reduce their energy costs, a lighting retrofit may be the answer. Philips Lumec, Visible Light Solar and EcoFit LEDs are all claiming significant energy savings with their new LED lighting products.
Case-in-point: Philips Lumec says its new state-of-the-art RoadStar luminaire, designed specifically for large area, street, and roadway lighting applications, has the potential to reduce by 50 percent the amount of electricity a city/state/country uses for street and roadway lighting.
The RoadStar luminaire, which uses the LUXEON Rebel power LEDs to provide over 70,000 hours of operational life, saves approximately 50 percent on energy consumption compared with traditional high intensity discharge (HID) cobra heads, and does not require special tooling to install or maintain, according to the company. Existing HID lighting fixtures can simply be swapped out.
Lower maintenance also contributes to the environment by reducing the need to deploy maintenance trucks and personnel by up to seven times, which saves money and cuts carbon emissions, said the company.
Another example is EcoFit Lighting's recently released DuraStreet series of LED light engines for existing roadway and outdoor lighting fixtures. EcoFit claims the DuraStreet series is the industry's first high-output LED light engine that fits virtually all existing street lighting fixtures including cobra heads and shoe boxes. Similar to RoadStar, no special tools are required for installation. The entire process takes less than five minutes, said the company.
DuraStreet provides light output equivalent to existing HID lighting fixtures while using less then half the energy, and requires essentially no maintenance, said the company. The series uses high-performance Cree LEDs, custom-designed Fraen optics and proprietary electronic power supplies. All EcoFit products are made in America. EcoFit provides a five-year warranty on LEDs and power supplies, and a ten-year warranty on chassis components.
A real-case retrofit indicates a significant cost savings can be achieved with solar/LED lighting solutions. Lexus of Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently selected Visible Light Solar Technologies to retrofit its exterior lot lights with solar/LED lighting at both its Albuquerque and Santa Fe dealerships following an initial pilot installation that yielded an 82 percent energy savings, according to the lighting company.
Visible Light Solar claims it is the first commercial and industrial lighting company to fully integrate LED lighting devices, solar power technology and advanced power management and control systems in exterior and interior lighting fixtures. The Vector line of retrofit products features a self powered device interface (SPDI), and an intelligent controller that monitors the solar battery level and manages the switching between battery and grid power for 100 percent reliability.
In addition, the SPDI allows fixture-by-fixture programmability based on clock time, motion detection and ambient light levels, providing enhanced security and the ability for customers to raise and lower illumination levels as needed.
