The Best CRI for Your Office Lighting

The Best CRI for Your Office Lighting Proper lighting plays an important role in the aesthetic and ambiance of an indoor space. For businesses and commercial facilities it is crucial to give attention to the layouts for lighting. Plentiful, uniform lighting improves visibility and reduces eye strain for office workers, in particular. As such, a well-lit office may improve overall productivity. Businesses are increasingly adopting Light Emitting Diode (LED) lights to provide affordable, high-quality lighting in their office space. LED lights consume less electricity than traditional light sources such as incandescent bulbs and fluorescent tubes. LiTian Lighting offers a diverse line of LED lighting and fixtures for indoor office use. We are one of the top commercial lighting manufacturers and suppliers in the U.S. and it's because of our commitment to excellence that we provide products that are efficient, durable, and register well on what is known as the Color Rendering Index (CRI). What is the Color Rendering Index? Consider the direct impact lighting can have on employees. While subjective assessments of light quality are important, an objective measure helps decision makers select an optimal lighting solution for their application and environment. The Color Rendering Index (CRI) offers a way to quantify the quality of light. The CRI uses eight pastel colors to determine how a solid-state light source renders color. The CRI operates on the following principle: If a light source renders the eight standard pastel colors well, it will also render all colors well. A light source's CRI ranges from 0-100. This number indicates how well a specific light source shows colors in comparison to a standard light. For example, most natural daylight has a CRI of about 75. The scale works as follows: The closer the CRI is to 100, the better the light source is at accurately rendering colors. A CRI value from 90-100 is considered excellent. CRI values less than 55 are poor at color rendering. LED lights generally have a CRI of 80-90, which means their light output is very similar to or more optimal than natural daylight. Colors lit by LED lights are almost identical to their color in natural sunlight. At the same time, LED lights can be brighter than natural light and are more cost-effective than conventional light bulbs. Conventional light sources such as fluorescent tubes can render colors very differently than natural light, making them appear artificial and causing undue strain on the human eye. In addition to color quality, LED lights have a much longer service life than incandescent bulbs or fluorescents. LED lights are an optimal light source for achieving good-to-excellent CRI for your business while keeping expenses low. Where on the CRI Scale is Office Lighting? Businesses should strive to make their office lighting as close to natural light as possible. Doing so will improve employee wellness, morale, and productivity. Dim or poor quality lighting not only contributes to physical strain, but can have a greater impact on accomplishing tasks that are tied into your business goals. Simply put: the environment you create is the setting for success. Research supports these claims. For example, hospital lighting has a direct impact on the performance of nurses. Another study showed that improving the lighting in post offices tremendously improved the productivity of postal workers. Daylight has a CRI of around 75, which means businesses should aim to achieve a CRI of 75 or better in their offices. Since LED lights have a CRI of about 85, they provide an optimal choice for commercial office lighting. As they cost less per year of service due to their long life and low power consumption, LED lights also offer additional long-term cost savings. LiTian Lighting is a leader in retrofitting conventional lighting systems with LEDs, helping businesses to improve employee productivity while reducing lighting expenses.

1. LEDs for General Lighting: What They Offe - Maxim Integrated

This tutorial discusses the expanding role that light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are playing in general lighting applications. It compares LED performance versus other lighting technologies. It also analyzes the main challenges of designing LED lamps that retrofit existing lighting systems. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are a rapidly evolving technology and are becoming viable for many general lighting applications, usually referred to as solid-state lighting (SSL). The most relevant examples of LED lighting applications are indoor uses in commercial, industrial, and residential environments; outdoor applications like street lights and parking lights; and architectural and decorative lighting where LEDs were initially adopted because of their ability to emit the whole spectrum of colors. LEDs have been an effective solution for architectural lighting for some time. Today LEDs are penetrating the mainstream general lighting market, thanks to their higher performance compared to other lighting technologies: In summary, LEDs offer many advantages over incandescent, halogen, and fluorescent lamps. Consequently, designers continue to find more applications for LED lighting, but that discussion could consume us for a long while. This review will focus on only two, but quite timely, applications: LED retrofit lamps and remote-controlled LED lighting. LED retrofit lamps are made to replace incandescent, halogen, or fluorescent lamps in the same socket. These LED lamps must fit in the existing form factor and be compatible with the existing infrastructure. LEDs for remote-controlled lighting allow greater flexibility in dimming and changing the color of the light. LED lamps are inherently digital systems, making it straight forward to integrate communications for lighting automation. The use of wireless or powerline-communication (PLC) remote control reduces power consumption, lowers operation and maintenance costs, and enables new LED applications. Many would argue that the LED retrofit lamp market is the fastest growing application for LED lighting today. The reason for this fast growth is actually quite straightforward: these lamps do not require a new electrical infrastructure (i.e., cabling, transformers, dimmers, and sockets), a significant advantage for LED technology. Fitting an LED lamp into the existing infrastructure challenges the designer in two principal ways: We shall discuss each challenge in turn. While size is important for a retrofit, thermal limitation is often more critical. LEDs emit only visible light; they do not irradiate energy at infrared wavelengths like other technologies. Thus, while LEDs are more energy efficient than incandescent or halogen lamps, they dissipate much more heat through thermal conduction in the lamp. Thermal dissipation is also the main limiting factor for the amount of light that a lamp can produce. Today's LED technology in retrofit lamps can barely achieve a level of brightness that is acceptable for the mainstream market. Pushing the limits of brightness and, consequently, thermal design are essential for designing a commercially successful product. A corollary issue to the thermal dissipation is the lifetime of the driver board. To emit more light, the lamp must work at a fairly high temperature (80C to 100C). At these temperatures, the lifetime of the driver board can limit the operation of the whole lamp. Electrolytic capacitors are the biggest challenge since they are the first component that fails at high temperature. Maxim's driver solutions for 120V AC/230V AC and 12V AC give customers the option of not having electrolytic capacitors, if they can accept higher LED ripple current. If instead the customer decides to use electrolytic capacitors, Maxim driver solutions are fault tolerant: a deterioration of the electrolytic capacitors causes the LED ripple current to increase, but the lamp does not fail. Retrofit LED lamps must work correctly in infrastructures that include cut-angle (triac or trailing-edge) dimmers and electronic transformers. Working off the 120V AC/230V AC line, the lamp can be preceded by a triac dimmer. Triac dimmers are designed to work well with incandescent and halogen lamps, which are perfectly resistive loads. With LED retrofit lamps, however, the LED driver is generally a very nonlinear and not purely resistive load; its input bridge rectifier typically draws brief, high-intensity peaks of current when the AC input voltage is at its positive and negative peaks. This LED behavior does not allow the triac dimmer to work properly, because it provides neither the needed start current nor the hold current. As a result, the dimmer does not start properly or turns off while operating, and the LED lamp flickers. The electrical infrastructure is even more complicated for 12V AC input lamps, because an electronic transformer and trailing-edge dimmer can be connected at the lamp's input. Again, a 12V AC input lamp driver that uses the traditional bridge rectifier and DC-DC converter topology flickers because of incompatibility with the transformer and dimmer. Maxim's LED solutions for 120V AC/230V AC and 12V AC input lamps use a single-stage conversion. By shaping the input current so that the light does not flicker even when dimmed, these solutions are compatible with triac and trailing-edge dimmers and electronic transformers. No other solutions for MR16 lights offer this feature; few solutions for PAR, R, and A lamps offer it. In addition, these solutions provide better than 0.9 power-factor correction and require a very limited number of external components. The 120V AC/230V AC input solution uses the MAX16841 , while the 12V AC solution employs the MAX16840. Both parts are available for evaluation and use in mass production.

2. How to supply 12 volt DC to all the windows in a new house build

You just answered your own question, "how do I splice 30 connections" / "breaker box for DC". However only one breaker box/service panel/load center on the market is capable of supporting DC, and that is Square D's "QO" type (the one with the 3/4" breakers; NOT the cheapie Homeline!)The trick is voltage drop. The much lower voltage is also much more sensitive to resistance loss through the wires. That forces you into larger wires. The good news is, economics of scale make #12 or #14 wire intended for AC mains barely more expensive than the #18 or #22 one normally associates with low voltage DC. There's no substitute for figuring out your current draws and doing the load calculations based on your distance. This must be done.Note that 24-volt systems are 4 times better for voltage drop. Crunch the numbers and you will see. If it's feasible to go 24V, consider it.12V or 24V DC systems can be an incredibly verstaile addition to a home, and can even allow it to weather long power outages with high functionality, much moreso if the house is smartly designed around that idea.For instance, a variety of LED lighting is made for 12/24V, including the popular LED strips, which dim very effectively, and even permit RGB color. Motion sensors are cheaper in 12/24V. If you make this auxiliary lighting, you could have it during power outages by adding a battery to the system. Many Internet modems/routers work on 12V, as do many TVs, and a typical Roku box or other smart-box attachment will also like 12V power. So there you are watching Netflix in the power outage. 12/24V house-sized refrigerators are not worth buying, but you can run an inverter for the times the fridge needs to run.The batteries need to be sized for the run-time you want to have, but them with some solar panels to top them up can be a lot cheaper than an installed generator system with changeover switch, yadayada. Heck a modest battery system is cheaper than those hokey 10-circuit switches alone. Or very small generator can be used simply to top up the batteries during period of low sun (or for that matter, your car's alternator).It could build out into quite a system if you wanted to

3. Is there a LED lighting product that can replace coventional interior overhead lighting?

Yes, there are a few on the market. Currently they are more comon and accessable in CA but you should be able to go online and find / purchase them. The upfront cost may be alittle steep but it will pay off in the long run