Thursday, 13 November 2008 21:43
Watch here the demonstration of lighting retrofit by SOTAE.
State Of The Art Electric is an energy conservation company whose goal is a drastic reduction in electrical energy consumption, with branches in over 9 cities around the country and expanding to other cities. The first step in this goal is retrofitting lighting technology.
To understand this process you must first understand the components and the terms. Many of the terms you see have the identical same meaning. For example a lamp is a bulb and a magnetic ballast is a transformer. A fixture or luminaire is the metal box that contain the lamps and ballasts. And the diffuser is the translucent plastic fixture cover that hides the lamps.
Recent advancements in fluorescent lighting technology can drastically reduce energy consumption and at the same time produce better quality lighting which lasts much longer. The old technology uses what are called T12 lamps (bulbs), and the new technology uses what are called T8 lamps. The letter T stands for tubular, and the number following the letter T represents the diameter of the lamp in eights of an inch. The T12 lamps have traditionally used what is called a magnetic ballast, which is basically a big ball of wire (transformer), that raises the voltage to what is required by the lamp, via a process called induction. This process is very inefficient and much of the energy consumed is wasted in the form of heat. More recent technological advances have replaced the magnetic ballast with electronic ballasts, that have almost no wasted energy, which means that the electricity used is converted to only lighting.
The process of updating the old technologhy is accomplished by opening the lighting fixtures and replacing the T12 lamps and magnetic ballasts with T8 lamps and electronic ballasts. This process is called retrofitting.
But the retrofitting does more than only reducing the energy consumption. Because the new T8 technology is more efficient it also has almost twice the amount of visable light as the older T12 technology. This is solved by reducing the number of lamps per fixture. This process is called delamping. So that the customer has the same lighting as they previously had with the T12 technology, a 2 lamp fixture is resized to a 1 lamp fixture, a 3 lamp is reduced to a 2 lamp fixture, a 4 lamp fixture is reduced to a 2 lamp fixture, etc. This allows the customer to have the same amount of lighting they started with, and at the same time gives them a better quality of light. This reduction of lamps reduces the energy consumption even more. For example, retrofitting and delamping a 4 lamp fixture will reduce your energy consumption by as much as 80 percent.
There are occasions where the original lighting was not proper for the type of business, and needs to be adjusted to the customer's needs. This can be accomplished buy using T8 lamps with a different color rendering index (CRI). The lower the CRI, the more warm the lighting, and the higher the CRI, the more bright white, and true to sun light. Color critical businesses typically need higher CRI lamps, dining areas tend to need warmer lighting, and office setting often have various CRI lamps, depending on personal preference.
Another step in the lighting program, is installing motion sensors to further reduce energy consumption. These can be wall mounted, replacing the light switch or fixture mounted.
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