How Best to Plan for LED Lighting
Last Post 16 Jun 2012 10:23 AM by ICFHybrid. 50 Replies.
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ICFHybridUser is Offline
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29 Sep 2011 09:41 AM
Does anyone feel they have been successful using software to get some answers on modeling a difficult lighting situation?

I've got high ceilings of various heights that I'd like to use as much LED as possible in, but I'm not sure if it is worth the effort of looking up a software program or whether it could even pull it off. I am worried about the flexibility of the software and the underlying fixture data. To be frank, it seems like many of the claims I've seen for LED units have been, well, inflated.

Maybe I'd be better served by putting effort and expense into a little hurried experimentation on the actual build?

Thoughts and software recommendations?
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30 Sep 2011 12:09 PM
These people used to have a decent downloadable freebie demo version:

http://www.visuallightingsoftware.com/

To be able to use any lighting design software you need the photometric files of the luminaires & bulbs, which may take some digging to get on some LEDs. LEDs are inherently anisotropic- most have profiles similar to PAR reflectors.
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03 Oct 2011 06:49 AM
I suggest you to meet once with professional and get his opinion and then start work.
<a href="http://www.epdmcoatings.com/">Liquid Rubber</a>
ICFHybridUser is Offline
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03 Oct 2011 07:00 PM
I suggest you to meet once with professional and get his opinion and then start work.
Professional? What professional, and what is going to happen in one meeting?
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28 Jan 2012 02:11 AM
There has been quite a bit of problems with LEDs and quality control. A lot of LEDs came out of China with really poor QC and failed within a few months.

I'm sticking with CFLs until the LED prices come down and QC improves. It has improved greatly since 2009 but it is still not 100% there. Plus a lot of the LEDs cannot put out the same amount of light as a CFL or even incandescent (is that a bad word?).

What I calculated with the price of LEDs, it would take me 20 years to break even vs. a CFL.
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14 Jun 2012 12:04 PM
If you're really concerned about efficiency and QC, LED's aren't a bad way to go at all. Problem with the LED's sold now is that they have AC-DC converters on top of them that burn out long before the LED does. Remove the drivers and attach the LED's to a DC system and you will get much higher efficiency and life. The price of an entire system is very close to a Lutron system, is much more efficient and dims nicely. And if you're designing your own place, a DC system gives lots of options because it is class 2. You could put lights wherever you wanted.
Where did you see that LED's can't provide the same amount of light as an incandescent or CFL? In everything that I have used, LED's have been way brighter and only used a fraction of the energy. CFL's don't last as long and use more energy than LED's anyways.

http://lumencache.com/
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14 Jun 2012 11:51 PM
I just finished evaluating LED "Crosstour" wall packs from Cooper Lighting. We were trying to figure out how many we need to illuminate our garage and driveway and the answer was a single 20 watt unit. Placed between two 10' garage doors and pointed up into the eaves, it was very impressive. It covered the garage door area well and extended at least 50 feet up the driveway. They can be mounted either up or down and when mounted down meet "dark sky" specs.

In fact, I also got "ordered" to replace the 250W metal halide farm light on the shop building as my wife has always hated it. It radiates more than 20,000 harsh lumens out into space. The replacement gets the job done with 1360 lumens. Only saves about $.40 a day or $146 per year, not to mention bulb replacements. It pays for itself in the first year.
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15 Jun 2012 01:52 PM
There's nothing quite like reducing the lumen output by more than an order of magnitude to enable reducing power input by an order of magnitude, eh? ;-)

The luminous efficiency of the metal halide HID was more than 10% higher than the LED unit that replaced it but you apparently didn't need that much light to serve the function. Efficiency is as much about designing in the right lighting levels as it is lumens per watt.


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15 Jun 2012 04:46 PM
Efficiency is as much about designing in the right lighting levels as it is lumens per watt.
Must be the case.

I am also beginning to suspect that single wavelength radiance has something to do with it as well. My wife has hated everything cooler than 3000K, but she was very happy with the 5000K (IIRC) Crosstour unit. 1360 lumens of anything else would have been woefully inadequate in the garage location.
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15 Jun 2012 06:12 PM
Most metal-halides have a pretty good spectrum compared to other HID techologies (sodium or mercury arc), with pretty good color rendering at any color temp usually north of 80. Many high-efficiency high color temp LEDs have poor-to-middlin' spectrum with color rendering indices in the 70s, overall visual efficacy is usually WAY better than crappy old school blue-mercury HIDs with sub-50 CRI.

LEDs tend to be highly directional, and while you get pretty good light levels at the center, beyond the fringes it dims out fast. Most older outdoor lighting has much broader beam-spread (that you might not need or want.)

Sounds like you found the right solution for your app though.
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16 Jun 2012 10:23 AM
Yeah, when you start moving to LED, you really need to take some time to rethink just about everything. I did a lot of mockups and they helped me to see the differences between what we did before and what you can do now.

For example, I had a 1-watt solar powered outdoor LED light that had been on the shelf for some time. Before we had power, I set it up as an initial test to see what might be required. It took a few days to charge itself enough to turn on. Washington State, winter :-(

I forgot about it, but a few days later I was driving by at night and from a thousand feet away, I thought that someone was over at the build site with the lights on. When I investigated, I found that 1 watt was uplighting half the place. It was pretty impressive, really. Based on that we speced 1 or 2 watt downlighting under the eaves to highlight high walls and not much else. I think it's going to be 22 watts total. There was 400 or 500 watts on the budget.
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