The LED system also greatly reduces maintenance requirements

Contrary to some recent comments from the periphery of the LED lighting industry, solid state lighting is able to demonstrate a clear return-on-investment in key applications currently being served by fluorescent lighting. Those include real-world installations in commercial, industrial and public sector applications. Nik Nicolakis, President and co-founder of led high bay Initiative notes that both solar and standard sign illumination can be added to the list. He stresses that Dimensional Innovations turned to Greenlight Initiative to identify and implement the LED lighting portion of their newest marker sign design. Dimensional Innovations, had several years’ experience with LED modules, and tried a number of installation options, including direct backlighting and custom-module approaches.

The standard LED-based retrofit lighting kit was internally end-mounted and arranged facing inward towards the center of the two-sided sign. Traditional high-output fluorescent illumination would typically mount four single-lamp T-12 110w tubes at intervals along the length of the marker sign. The LED system’s highly controlled light distribution allowed the same sign to be equivalently illuminated with only 130 total watts instead of 440 watts for the T-12 solution. It is notable that the LED installation is particularly effective with a solar-power system because it is compatible with the “native” 12-volt output of the solar panels and batteries. This eliminates the need for expensive or inefficient inverters and ballasts normally used to supply 110v AC to the fluorescent tubes. The long life of the LED system also greatly reduces maintenance requirements.

Dimensional Innovations' R&D Specialist Curtis Shaddox says on paper, it was clear that an LED lighting system would be the preferred approach for seamless integration within a large solar-powered sign installation. The challenge continually confronting them was how to separate hype from reality with the technology. They turned to led high bay light Initiative because they have clearly invested themselves in testing and qualifying real solutions that work today. It was quite a pleasant surprise to find that they could recommend an off-the-shelf solution that has performed even better than we could have predicted.