Lighting your factory with LED - take care to get a great result

“A no-brainer” stated the Finance Director, delighted at his return on investment as he installs new lights that use 66% less energy and require no maintenance for a promised 10 years. “ And it reduces our CRC charge, shows how green we are and the lighting cost will be relatively stable over the next ten years “. Enthusiastic LED lighting salesman is delighted. At £350 each, this is a valuable sale.

Two months earlier he had been approached by an independent consultant who had told him lots about LEDs – and had recommended an English manufacturer of LED lighting for his factory. Delighted, the Finance Director had ordered 20 units of the English lights every month.

But the Enthusiastic LED lighting salesman had shown him a new light that was £150 cheaper and appeared to do the same job. The Financial Director cancelled the order with the English manufacturer and asked Enthusiastic LED salesman to supply 20 units of the new, cheaper Chinese lights every month.

A month after these new lights had been installed the English manufacturer received a call. “These new lights appeared every bit as bright as yours, but six of the initial 20 have already failed and they are already less bright than they were when installed. I have taken them all out and we are fighting with the supplier over the credit now due. Please can we get back to our original deal.”

This true story illustrates the challenges in selecting the right LED light for your task. Typically a customer will respond positively to the initial approach to reduce the energy consumption with LED. The promise of savings is so attractive and the manufacturer’s presentation so effective it is difficult to see what could possibly go wrong.

The truth is that LED is a largely unregulated technology. The lighting design community is highly cynical of the claims made by even the most familiar household names, who peddle the phrase “equivalent to 50W” without any qualification of that statement and many major companies are regretting their rush to adopt a technology which leaves them with half the light they had before, despite a significant investment.

Now the Finance Director is delighted. He has found the right light to last for 10 years. But he found out that choosing the right LED lighting is complex. The key steps were not only to establish how much light they needed, how much energy would be required to supply that light efficiently (because he thought he’d understood that bit), but also to really understand how long the lights would remain at full brightness. Once these issues have been defined, the key questions are: (1) can the manufacturer/supplier be trusted to supply accurate data and (2) what would happen if anything goes wrong ?

84 x £350 is a lot of money to throw away if the supplier will not support you. Spending 84 x £500 is well worth it if you have a payback in less than two years and you can actually drive to the English factory if problems do arise as far as 7 years out.

LED provides the right light for the long term BUT choose with care.

Ian Peter MacDonald - MacDonald Tait Light - info@macdonaldtait.com- 01603 788448