Green Environment

Green Building Concepts

The world of lighting systems serves a wide variety of situations and categories. A typical installation will include many lamp types including HID, low and high pressure sodium, mercury vapor, metal halide, halogen, and fluorescent lamps. There are many lighting vendors, but only a few specialize in efficient lamping

Light output is measured in lumens. A light source has both a color temperature, those color tones which the light amplifies (cool, warm, etc.) and a color rendering index (CRI) or the ability to display color properly in a given color temperature (compared to a full spectrum light source).

Energy Efficiency AND Good Health

Considering all of this, its frustrating that the building industry for the past 50 years has been primarily concerned with the energy element of artificial lighting, rather than human health concerns. However, we consider lighting to be a hugely important element of sustainable building design. We consider "sustainable design" to include consideration of ergonomics, human health and comfort in addition to energy consumption. Because of this, we would like to expand on the LED lighting criteria and explain how you can find the most sustainable, beautiful and healthy lighting options for your needs.

How to Go Green: Lighting

How we light up the places we live and work makes a big impact on how we feel. It also makes a big impact on the environment. The kind of bulbs, the kind of fixtures, the kind of power, and the habits we keep can all add up to a very significant greening. Start with the fact that a conventional incandescent bulb turns only around five to ten percent of its consumed energy into light, the rest goes out as heat. From there, there's no limit to how green your lighting can be.

LED Lighting

A LED (Light Emitting Diode) is a semi conductor which converts electricity into light. Led lighting has been around since the 1960's but is now more affordable and freely available. LED devices that emit photons when an electrical charge is applied to them, are more efficient and last longer than incandescent light bulbs. By varying the composition of the semiconductor LEDs, materials scientists can coax the devices into emitting different colors. At the minimum, producing white light requires combining red, blue, and green, but so far, only red- and blue-light-emitting diodes are well developed. To produce green light, LED manufacturers typically apply one or more phosphor materials to blue LEDs. The phosphors convert high energy blue spectrum light into lower-energy light through a process that reduces overall luminosity by approximately 20 percent.

To eliminate this loss of efficiency, researchers have tried to develop efficient green LEDs that don't require phosphors. But a major stumbling block is that the different known semiconductor materials that can be combined to emit green light, typically gallium nitride, have different-sized crystal lattice structures. For semiconductors to work efficiently, each layer of the device has to have a similarly sized lattice structure as the layer above or below it. As technology has moved forward white led's have become available in a single diode rather than mixing red, green and blue (RGB).

Advantages of LED Lighting:

•   Low energy consumption
•   Long life
•   Environmentally sound – No mercury content
•   Color range all colors of the spectrum – various varieties of white
•   Durability – operating temperature range - 40C to 185C