The Lamp Room

Ansell LED panel. Apparently that's an upgrade.

"cleaner light" no. Just more glare, possibly lower CRI.

"No maintenance" true, just chuck it in the bin when it's fucked! ...which could be sooner than when a decent set of T5 tubes would require replacing anyway

I don’t know how they’d fair with T5, (we don’t have any T5 mods at work), but I’ve just had to replace the old 600 x 1200 existing LED panels in our HR office with Ansell 6 by 12 LED panels, and their definitely brighter than a 6 by 12 T8 equivalent.
Don’t know how long the old panels were in there for but they must have been some of the first generation of 600 x 1200 LED panel as the weight of them was ridiculous!, they had some form of backing that I thought was Bakelite!, and they were about an inch thick!

All the other office’s have T8 mods that I have plenty of tubes for, it just seems to be the HR office that were changed to LED panels?

Well, I'm sure that the LED panels in the pic at the top are indeed brighter than the T5 fittings they're shown next to.

BUT.....

T5 fittings probably have well-worn lamps in, which have likely not been changed in ages - you're not going to replace the lamps and then rip the fittings out weeks later...

LED panels are always stupidly bright when first installed, but they sure as hell won't stay that way - give it a few months and the output will already have started to drop off.

People fail to realise the above and they fail to reaslise that the LED panel is totally sealed and can't be serviced or relamped. the T5 fitting on the other hand can be - time and time again. I know which I think is better for the environment. And then we come to col,our rendering - the T5 tubes are going to be far better there and you can change the lamp to change the colour output. Whilst a few LED panels now on the market do offer colour selection, it's generally a choice between a harsh blue daylight (somewhere around 6500K) a cool white (somewhere around 4000K) and a warm white (somewhere around 2700K) and that's if you're lucky. A lot only do 2 colours. There are far more colours available in T5, as well as premium phosphor coatings (colours starting with a 9, such as 930....) won't see those with an LED.

Then we move onto optical control - the T5 fitting has a louvre, so low glare and it puts the light where it's needed. The LED panel has ZERO optical control and is a massive glare bomb with no cut-off at all. It amazes me how these things are legal when you think back just a few years to the Cat2 louvre requirements.....

The modern LED panels are just a thin board with the diffuser on the bottom and the rest metal. The driver is usually just stuck on top. The lifetime can vary with them depending on the manufacturer. Some will dim out after just a couple of years but some will be fine like some I knew that were 5 years old and 99% were fine.

I see failed ones around but it's usually just the odd one.






In this shop it wasn't just the odd one - all of them had done this!

How can they make LED backlit monitors and TV's so reliable but LED lighting panels so rubbish when they are basically the same?

I guess they must be made to a higher standard. I have an a cheap AOC monitor from 2013 that was hammered but it looks fine still. My main monitor is also AOC and looks the same as the day I got it 2016. I have seen failing LED in monitors however, it's very rare.

Another “upgrade” for the forums.. shows fittings that are badly maintained anyway and done more hours than the LED ones will ever do. If those got some new tubes / starters they would be much brighter than those LED ones.

image

That looks like plastic trunking held with plastic clips?
If so that's deffo not legal!