LED panels for the office
How LEDs can make a world of difference.
LED lighting got a bad wrap for a while due to its blue light content (which is not damaging to healthy eyes), but over the past few years, as public priority has shifted to a desire to go green, more and more people are having a light bulb moment and switching to LED lighting. Whether it’s for your home, office, street, park, a football field, or a stadium, the impact of LED lights are much more far reaching than you might imagine. Making a small change in your office building to LED panels can have a really dramatic effect on your carbon footprint, and on your energy expenditure.
Positive energy.
Fluorescent lights convert 95% of their energy into heat, and only 5% into actual light. This means that a massive 95% of that energy is wasted, as you can’t exactly utilise that heat to warm your office. LED lighting, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite; converting 95% of its energy to light and only wasting 5% as heat.
LED lights not only waste less energy, but they draw less power than traditional lighting. You can replace an 84 watt fluorescent light with a 36 watt LED light for the same effect. This smaller energy use also results in a lesser demand from power plants, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel burnt in order to create electricity.
This means that using LED lighting in your office could hugely bring your electricity bill down, and you can work in peace without worrying about wasted electricity down the drain.
Less light and noise pollution.
LEDs boast a better quality of light distribution, which is why they’re a great weapon in the fight against light pollution. LEDs focus light instead of scattering light in every direction (including up at the sky). This means that not only do you need a light with less wattage, you also don’t need as many lights.
Not only do LED lights improve on energy conservation in terms of conversion into light rather than heat, but they’re also designed to avoid the generation of any vibration or humming noise, which cuts down on noise pollution also. It seems minimal, but if you imagine that every single street light, every stadium and park light, and every house or office light in the entire world gives off a slight hum or vibration when using conventional bulbs, that’s a massive amount of noise. Using LEDs cuts out all of this background noise.
No toxic elements.
LEDs contain no nasty chemicals, like mercury, beating out fluorescent lights once more. Many offices currently use fluorescent lighting, which contains 4 to 5 milligrams of mercury in each light. This mercury either contaminates the environment when disposed of with the rest of your rubbish, or costs you extra money and time in arranging disposal through a registered waste carrier.
LED lights are free of any toxic elements, so switching to LED avoids both damaging the environment and the cost and time implications that come with compliance with disposal regulations.
Waste not, want not.
Not only do LEDs avoid a huge amount of energy wastage, but they also produce much less physical waste. LEDs last up to six times longer than their fluorescent counterparts, with a lifespan of between 30,000 and 50,000 hours. This longer life span means lower carbon emissions, and fewer resources needed in the manufacturing process, resulting not only in a better outcome for the environment, but less expenditure for you.
Why not kit out your office with LED lighting instead if you’re not there already? It’s cheaper in the long haul, less wasteful, and a better choice to make for the world we live in. If you’re thinking about making a positive choice and changing the lighting in your office or home but you’re not convinced that making the change is cost effective, use our lighting calculator to figure out how much you could actually be saving.