How do you choose lighting products? You might be planning to buy LED lights, or you might have just made final decision. But there are some things other than Initial price and Energy costs, that you must know to take full advantage of LED lights.
1. Working hours:
LED lights are built for the long life, so why not use it fullest? LED light should not be installed at very little usage area. It is your dead investment.
Some high usage areas are listed here for the reference: Shopping center, underground parking, streets, offices, hotels and restaurants, warehouse, tunnel, museum, wash rooms, homes with low natural light access and all the places where it is cloudy and low sunshine weather for most of the time.
2. Reliability:
LED lights with good driver can withstand vibration, unreliable power supply, voltage fluctuation, on/off cycles and where other bulb expires faster. LED light should be used in factories, industries and rural industries for such reasons.
There are also some application areas where it is difficult to reach for bulb replacement. Changing bulbs at Street light, high floor height, balcony and domes is costly than the original price of bulb.
At Some critical places like hospitals, shopping mall, restaurant, airport, plants, offices and public place, going dark for some hours is not affordable. They should use LED lights for reliability.
3. Directional light:
LED lights don’t throw lights in all 3 dimensions. They point the lights toward single plane. There are some advantage and disadvantage of this property. Street lights, highbay lights, downlights, flood lights are best uses of this property. They minimize the waste of reflectors and other directions.
4. Dimming:
Another good property of LED lights is dimming. You can adjust the amount of illumination as well as power bill. Consider a small shop where there is rush of customers during some peak hours. They can dim LED lights during Low rush hours to save lots of power. All LED lights are not dimmable, but it depends on driver. Customer should check their requirements and dimming ability before purchase to take full advantage.
5. Low power & high power:
LED can provide lowest illumination with minimum power usage as well as highest illumination too. LED is available for 0.5 watt to 500W applications. It is not possible for any other bulb types to make only 100 lumens light with 1-2 watt usage. CFL bulb starts with 5W and incandescent bulb at 15W.
6. Colors:
White LEDs are available in various color temperature, which is not possible in all the lightings. RGB color LED can produce millions of color for decorative requirements. You don’t need color filters to produce different colors. Just adjust your color with remote control.
7. Recycle:
And after all long service life when you wish to throw LED lights, they are still valuable. They have lots of aluminum in their body and heat sinks. If considering price of metal after 10 years, LED lights have better return on investment even after failure.
