The Lamp Room

Alright for some people, if your mates with the head teacher. Some twat company has been in to redruth school and some some bollocks survey to convert the school (apart from the T5s to LED) they have never done work at the school before and have fed them a load of fake news and bull shit. Telling them that they will save £20,000 a year in electric and saying that changing tubes is costing a fortune and that they only last 4 years. Funny as the new block that was actually built in 2001 is still rocking mainly French Philips master from when it was built! I can’t see the benefit in changing a 3x18Wx HF (48W) to a 40-50W led? Absolute absolute joke. another massive chunk of my livelihood gone.

That doesn’t sound good Kev!

That's shite. No doubt when all these LED panels start failing, the company will be long gone.

How much electricity do you reckon they're actually saving?

Well not a lot, I know the schools electric bill is over 100k a year but it’s a massive site. Loads of heaters everywhere

If a lot of the heating is electric, one would suspect that's where most of the money is going.

Anyway onto the most important question, is any of it worth saving and if so will you be able to get any?

Anything other than LED just isn’t fashionable these days. People have that mentality that it must be better and greener because it’s LED and LED is greenery and lower energy... even when it isn’t! The marketing and fake hype has people thinking that fluorescent uses as much energy as tungsten incandescent lamps and only last as long too!

In my last job, management wanted to replace all of the fluorescents on the production floor with LED to save energy and it was only canned when I complied a report and sent it to them that said you basically already have high efficiency low energy T5 fluorescent fittings with electronic ballasts and due to the high costs of the fittings themselves and the cost of installation, the very small energy saving would take a very long time indeed to pay for itself! And if you want to change the colour temperature, you just change the lamp, which they did in the end.

Back in 2012 our town was rolling out a plan for going LED for all lighting in the outside and in municipal buildings. The company claimed 80% energy savings (compared to 70..250W SON and 36W T8's that were making most of the lighting in the town respectively)

I compiled a report and present it personally to our mayor... Which ended up about like this :

"Head of science in the state says that it is beneficial to replace all lighting to LED. Now go away"

Our town is now all LED except for a handful of forgotten lanterns, and few tubes in hard to reach places in school hallways

I have seen the reports that the LED company and town council were presenting for everyone from outside, and also what was done in reality..

150W SON were changed (Report : 250W SON were changed)

To 80W LED (Report : to 30W LED)

The official measurements to compare the light levels were done in an area where maintenance had not been carried out for 8 years. About 1/4th of the lamps of the original SON install were lighting at a time and i bet they measured their 1 Lux or so under one that was out at the moment. The energy consumption of the old install was evaluated as if all lanterns are working. (250W SON cobraheads to 80W LED lens panels)

In the next place where they did before/after measurements, the original SON install was maintained well but was overgrown by a jungle of tree branches. Instead, they cut down all tree branches that were obstructing the light to take the LED measurement. (70W SON baloons to 36W LED corns in same baloons)

(In both cases report : Light levels improved)

The LEDs used in the outdoors are 6500K lens panels with 24 LEDs for 80W (replacing most arm mount lanterns) and 26W..45W corns replacing 70W..100W SON or 125W Merc lamps in posttops (Report went on about how 3000K is the perfect color temperature for night vision)

The LEDs used in school classrooms were originally transparent half tubes (the type where top is a heatsink) of 6500K i think ~15W. That is, a line of 2512 LED chips in plain view. After complaints from teachers about headaches they changed to a frost version of the same tubes in one school. That was replacing 36W/765 T8's. In my high school (i dropped a visit a couple years back) there was one luminaire in a row of few which they didnt change because it contained emergency module. It was providing most of the light over the area under nearby converted luminaires (Report went on about bashing Fluorescents and how dangerous they are for health)

In the nights when they took meter readings (they were supposed to evaluate the effects of the new dimming system) they shut down the lighting in all footpaths and fountain pumps (feeding also from the lighting meter)

The reliability of the new lighting required constant maintenance and repairs ever since the retrofits (Report : trouble free operation for 10 years)

The original goal of saving 80% of the energy was not met. They were supposed to get some green award from the EU for the achievments (we had UN cars driving around the place at around the time when they were taking measurements). It was lowered to 75% and then to 50%, for all i know they still didnt get any reward. But i bet the visitors from the EU/UN were using us as a "success story" to push LEDs to others