2013-10-28
Monday Roundup: Bright Lights, Biggest City
This week: An all-LED-lit Walmart store, house calls for an LED diet, and New York's plan to upgrade its street lights.
NYC to replacce 250,000 street lights with LEDs
It will be the largest retrofit project to date, eclipsing Los Angeles for that honor. It will take four years to replace all the city's sodium-vapor lights, which New York Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said cast a "yellowish, almost horror movie-kind of light."
Upon completion, the city is looking to save $6 million per year in energy costs and $8 million per year in maintenance (though the LEDs are quoted at only three times the lifetime of the traditional lights). Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the project will cost $79 million, and the ROI will be in six years.
Philips LED lighting system aims to comfort intensive care patients
At the Charité Clinic in Berlin, Philips has worked with a design studio and an architectural firm to equip two intensive-care recovery rooms with LED lighting to speed healing. The 15,400 LED lights cover the ceilings and walls in front of patient beds and can be programmed to mimic daylight or to deliver light shows designed to reduce stress. The medical equipment in the room has been concealed, and the noise level has been reduced from that of a typical ICU.
Philips has some research data supporting the premise that artificial daylight displays can help the sleep patterns of hospitalized patients. At Charité Clinic, ICU physicians, sleep researchers, and psychologists will be studying the effects of the IC lighting systems over the next year.
Walmart opens first all-LED-lit store in Ohio
In South Euclid, Ohio, the Walmart store uses LEDs for ceiling lights, for illuminating parking lots and building signage, and for all refrigerated cases in the grocery section. The company says this store will be the blueprint for future construction. In addition to energy-efficient lighting, the store uses daylight harvesitng to reduce energy needs even further, and it reclaims heat from the refrigeration equipment to heat water.
Making house calls
We have talked about how the average consumer might go to Home Depot or Lowes for a lighting project and come away terminally confused, or with a shopping basket full of products that are totally inapropriate for the application.
One company is short-circuiting the problem of educating consumers about LED lighting. Bethesda Systems, an audio-visual company in suburban Washington, DC, is making house calls to ensure that people get the lights that are right for them and their situations, and then installing the lights for the cost of the bulbs. The company calls the service the LED Diet, and the employees going on the house calls are "dieticians," of course. The company owner stressed that it is not selling the kinds of LED bulbs you can get at Home Depot or Lowes.
— Keith Dawson 
, Editor-in-Chief, All LED Lighting
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