Wendell D. Strong, GENISYS PoE Lighting Manager, Innovative Lighting
In the Beginning there was light…
With over 30 years of commercial lighting experience, I can honestly say for the first time, we are really starting to innovate as an industry. That will catch some off guard and stir some lively conversations.
Perspective being everything, it is important to note in our advanced society with all of our bells and whistles of technology, it was just over 100 years ago that most work was being done by open flame light sources. Sources that, inherently, created more heat than light. Hard to believe when you first recognize the truth.
Incandescent, and its close cousin, halogen, are both still with us. The former surviving nearly every attempt to kill it off, and the later still growing in market share today.
Fluorescent, a 1940s lighting technology, is still the lighting technology of choice for most buildings in the US and has quite possibly “over-matured” as lighting source if that is possible.
HID sources continue onward as the workhorses of outdoor lighting and industrial spaces. However, due to their natural inability to control them well, are giving ground to SSL/LED sources more rapidly.
Ah, LED, the saving grace of lighting technology. High efficacy, long life with gradual lumen depreciation and what do we do have with it? Treat as if it were like all other light sources and operate on AC high voltage systems that have also been around for 100 years or so.
Of course, SSL/LED is much different and much more disruptive as a technology than any of us actually realized early on. LEDs don’t want or need AC high voltage as in their native state LEDs are low voltage direct current devices.
As low voltage direct current devices, LEDs turn on and off rapidly and dim smoothly with no negative effect on their rated life, in fact both actually extending their useful lives. LEDs in their natural state “want” to be controlled.
Voila. We have never had a light source with such characteristics before. All we have to do is apply what the LED “wants” from the power source and we can eclipse 100 years of legacy control at the same time. It is literally a new dawn of lighting. We can expect and deliver far more benefits to the workplace than ever before.
* Article Featured on Electrical Trends
