News - Where Exterior Lighting was Then and Where It is Now

  • A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN JUST 20 YEARS: WHERE EXTERIOR LIGHTING WAS THEN & WHERE IT IS NOW

    To give you an idea of what the new generation of LED-based exterior lighting can mean to your projects, think back to what your life was like in 1990. That was over 20 years ago. Your cell phone, if you had one, was so big and heavy, carrying it probably qualified as an exercise program. Businesses and governments threw tons of dollars at something known ominously as Y2K, which was supposed to throw us back into the Stone Age. (It didn’t, but they still spent billions on new IT systems). The washing machine and dryer you bought that year? They’re probably long gone…or chugging along on their last legs, costing more in energy alone than it would take to replace them with newer models.
    Back then; the lighting industry was dominated by high intensity discharge sources like metal halide and high pressure sodium. Those lights were based on systems that often required the so-called 20,000-hour lamps in a standard exterior scenario to be replaced in masses as early as 8,000 hours after they were installed. Which means scheduled bulb replacements would have started just two years after installation
    Think about what that really means. While businesses and government agencies have always been told that they should do group “re-lamping” at the 8,000-hour mark, the fiscal reality is that hardly any of them ever do. They usually do spot re-lamping instead. That gets pretty costly year in and year out when you tally up the maintenance costs of hiring a crew, getting a lift truck out to the facility, and buying and installing the replacement lamps. It also results in poor lighting when lights go out, creating safety and image issues as well.
    LED-based exterior lighting systems, on the other hand, not only can be designed to last up to 100,000 hours – they actually can remain in service that long, almost maintenance-free. That means they can last up to 20 years. By the time you’d need to replace your LED luminaire, who knows where technology will have taken us? Maybe we’ll all finally be carrying around the portable quantum generators that were predicted.
    For businesses and governments looking to make smart infrastructure investments, LED-based exterior systems offer greater reliability, a wider range of optics to choose from, and can now last near maintenance-free for more than a decade. It’s one of the smartest fiscal moves they can make. Much smarter than our old washers and dryers that have needed to be replaced in the past 20 years.