LEDlights4you are launching a “Eye friendly” Logo.
This simple idea is like the RED TRACTOR logo on fresh food products to enable customers to buy with the confidence of knowing their Office Lights are “Eye Friendly”.
Why is this important? As a LED lighting suppliers and Fitters we are well aware of how staff can be effected by poor quality LED Lighting.
What can go wrong? We genuinely are receiving calls every week from concerned managers, and staff with complaints form staff of Headaches, Migraines and Eye Fatigue.
It’s beginning to be a common issue, the office upgrades to LED lights, there are several issues that can cause this.
Firstly if you previously had T8 Fluorescent Lighting the overall LUX levels (brightness) is fairly low especially if they are 15 – 20 years old. Sure the tubes are changed as they fail which will be brighter for a few months. However because of the heat generated by the fluorescent tubes they deplete by 30% within the first 3 months!
Therefore, its quite common for us to reduce the number of lights by up to 50%, otherwise it can cause an issue similar to Snow Blindness, because the reflected light of white paper is simply too bright. Often the lighting plan has to be redesigned to compensate for this.
Secondly most customers buy lighting based on the price, without any thoughts about the quality of the product, specification which is complicated to the novice or even the build life. For example where lights are often on 24/7 like a Hospital or a Call Centre, I’ve seen Panel LED lights failing after a year!
These lights also displayed issues with the light quality commonly Flicker and Glare.
What is Flicker? This is especially and issue with poor LED quality drivers (that’s the bit that converts the electrical power from AC to DC. LED’s work on DC current similar to most electronics like a lap top or tablet. Flicker is where the AC mains frequency is bleeding through into the DC circuit causing a strobing effect. The strobing is not normally visible the naked eye but you’ll see it if you view through a Mobile camera in movie mode. It looks like ripples running down the screen.
This is disturbing to the eyes and over several hours causes eye fatigue which can lead to headaches and migraines. In some people who suffer from certain medical conditions such as epilepsy or autism it can induce a fits.
Thirdly Glare is due to the quality of the lens on the panel or battens as this should filter out the intensity of the light making the reflected light fairly flat. This is very important in offices where there are screens as Glare will result in refection and again eye fatigue.
Finally the colour temperature of the lights is also important, to understand this LED’s produce electronic light. For those of you who remember record players and vinal records, these were raw sound recorded onto a disc. There has been a revival of vinal because it produces more feel than CD’s which is digitised electrically assimilated sound. What’s missing in electronic sound is the sound we cant hear but we can feel it.
With LED’s this is electronic digitized light, it hasn’t got the side bands which we can’t see, Infrared and Ultra Violet. Both of these elements are produced in natural sun light, it give you a tan and helps plants grow.
However LED’s come is several colours across the lighting spectrum, these are measured in Kelvins. Natural LED’s come in Cool White 6000 – 6500K. This is fine for open Spaces or Warehouses but not good in Office or Educational Environments. Natural Sun lights is 5,300 Kelvin, in an Office or Educational environment 4000 Kelvin is more restful and closer to the yellowy Fluorescent lights we have come accustomed to.
Bright Sunlight can easily be 2,000 LUX that’s why we were sunglasses. So for an Office or educational environment 300 LUX is the average for a comfortable light without causing “Eye Fatigue”.
LEDlights4you have introduced a ladling Logo on our lighting to enable customers to check to see that their lights are compliant. As professional Lighting engineer’s we survey offices regularly and normally come up with a lighting plan build to address these issues using only “Eye Friendly” Lighting.