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Author Topic: LED Lighting Power  (Read 24004 times)

Tim McCulloch

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #40 on: January 06, 2014, 04:23:19 PM »

And then I question why most LED bulbs for home use are labeled for use in open fixtures only, due to heat from the ballast/psu.

One very new building we work in has 100% LED, including what look like 150w. floodlights in "can" fixtures recessed in the ceiling.  Although the can is open on the bottom it is enclosed on the top.  The building staff have replaced a bunch of LED lamps that are only a few months old and the vendor is blaming heat. 
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Stephen Swaffer

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #41 on: January 06, 2014, 04:55:29 PM »

Pesky little details-wire/screw colors, speaker polarity, fixture type lamps are designed for why should we have to pay attention to all these little things?

You can light a descent sized room with 4, 10 watt Led can lights-given that you should be able to run about 60 of them on that 5Amp/125 V service maybe we have come full circle and will see service sizes dropping?  I do have some can light inserts that are strobing noticeably in one of my installs going to have to fix that-but might be an issue you run in to.  (Around here-rural Iowa-it is not uncommon to run into services with the metered and unmetered conductors run in the same 1" conduit and the conductors are the old rubber insulated so not much copper to run a house on!)

IF the expected life claims hold up, there should be significant cost and safety benefits for lights located in inconvenient locations.  I am surprised at the number of traffic lamps/truck lights etc that are missing "pixels" given that lamp life claims and the recent rise of the technology leading you to believe we shouldn't be seeing much of that for another 3-5 years. 
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Mike Sokol

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #42 on: January 06, 2014, 06:09:31 PM »

Here's a 120-volt / 5-amp Westinghouse meter that could work for my LED/Tungsten demonstration. The price is right at $20 plus $11 shipping. Wonder if it will spin up.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370975108333&fromMakeTrack=true&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:top:en

Stephen Swaffer

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #43 on: January 06, 2014, 06:45:07 PM »

The Iowa State Fair had a demo that let you "feel" the difference last year-a generator run by a stationary bicycle that could be switched to various lighting technologies -tungsten was a lot of work to light :)
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Jonathan Johnson

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #44 on: January 06, 2014, 11:11:13 PM »

Have you contacted your local electric utility? They may be interested in helping by providing a meter for free.

Some utilities will loan out Kill-A-Watt devices, but for what you're doing they may not be appropriate.
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Mike Sokol

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #45 on: January 07, 2014, 01:57:51 AM »

Have you contacted your local electric utility? They may be interested in helping by providing a meter for free.

Some utilities will loan out Kill-A-Watt devices, but for what you're doing they may not be appropriate.

I do have a couple of buddies at the POCO. Since they've been replacing a lot of old meters with modern RF readable ones, there's probably a warehouse with thousands of old ones laying around. I'll give them a shout tomorrow.

And I already have a Kill-A-Watt and every other type of voltmeter and ammeter that provide very accurate numerical readouts. But demonstrations are more about visual examples rather than accurate data. I want something that everyone will agree means money is being spent. Even my wife gets worried if she sees the little wheel spinning on our house electric meter. That's why I think it will be a great example of the power required by tungsten, CFL and LED lighting.

James Feenstra

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #46 on: January 08, 2014, 12:13:24 PM »

Since I teach sound production workshops at churches and schools around the country, I've been getting questions about LED lighting. And while I'm learning a lot about the technology (power requirements, dimming, connecting, etc...) the big question is "How much will it cost, and how much will it save?". So I'm looking for any sort of spreadsheet or charts that will outline or calculate the ROI payback times for various LED upfit/installs. For instance, a brand new room should have a pretty quick ROI payback since LEDs will require a smaller HVAC unit, less power circuits, and distributed rather than centralized dimmers, not to mention the gel/color flexibility and reduced lamp maintenance. But older buildings with an operational tungsten lighting system will have a much longer ROI payback time for LED upgrades, especially when you consider that the existing lighting, wiring, and HVAC systems have already been paid for. However, you still need to consider reduced KWH costs and gel/lamp savings.

Finally, it would be great to get some LED lighting gear to demonstrate in my seminars. For instance, I plan to hook up an old-school spinning house meter with a bunch of different light technologies and dimmers plugged into it. Then my seminar attendees will be able to watch the power meter spin slower or faster using tungsten, CFL and LED bulbs of equivalent foot candles. I've found that dry charts and graphs are a hard sell to administration types who don't know or care about technology. But showing them a spinning power meter should get the point across pretty easily.
generally speaking the cost savings with LEDs does not come from energy savings in terms of a venue installation. There are some energy savings, but the big money savings comes from consumables and maintenance.

With an example like theatrical house lights, the cost to replace a $2 light bulb is fairly significant if it requires scaffolding, minimum labor calls, or other extensive procedures. With LEDs requiring significantly less replacements and maintenance, the savings in this area is significant over energy savings.

Switching a conventional wash fixture (say a 575w S4 par) out for an automated LED wash fixture (ie. a mac 301 at 350w) will produce a significant long term cost savings in labor and consumables, as you've eliminated the costs of gel, lamps and labor to refocus it for every show. Long term, this will produce a higher return than the minimal energy savings (225w/hr of use, at $0.15/kwh the savings is slightly above $0.03) could hope to achieve. This is assuming that both fixtures are used for the same amount of time at full output.

This thread on Control booth has some good points regarding the actual electrical savings for LED products, including a link to a very well written article.
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Mike Sokol

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #47 on: January 08, 2014, 12:36:29 PM »

Consider this: all of the energy used by lighting eventually decays into infrared energy which heats the room. A 60W incandescent provides about 205 BTU/hr of heating. A 9W LED (luminous equivalent to 60W incandescent) provides about 31 BTU/hr. That is 205 BTU/hr or 31 BTU/hr that the furnace does not need to provide -- that is, if you turn the lights off, the furnace must provide that energy to maintain the air temperature. Total energy used by the home remains the same, regardless of which lamp is used and whether it is on or off.

Actually, I'm going to install some 100-watt incandescent bulbs as heaters for my parents house. They have a new bathroom/addition that was built without any real insulation under the crawl space. So with the sub-zero temps in Maryland, they froze some pipes yesterday. We're  insulating the walls of the crawl space, the installing a pair of 100-watt incandescent bulbs near the pipe which are powered by a thermostat switch that turns on below 35 F degrees and off above 40 F degrees. The ThermoCube is available at Tractor Supply for $13 and is rated for 1,500 watt water heaters for farms. I had to convince my 84 year old father that these shouldn't be CFL bulbs (he loves those things), but in this case we need the actual 100-watt heating action of the tungsten bulbs. I'll monitor the crawl space temp during the next cold snap, but I'm pretty sure the extra wall insulation and 200 watts of tungsten bulb heating should do the trick.

Jonathan Johnson

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #48 on: January 08, 2014, 08:01:26 PM »

The ThermoCube is available at Tractor Supply for $13 and is rated for 1,500 watt water heaters for farms

To keep the math simple, we'll assume that the rate is $0.13/kWh. That means the ThermoCube needs to "save" 100 kWh (or 100,000 watt-hours) to pay off. With a 200W heating load (the two 100W light bulbs) it will need to be off for 500 hours that the lights would otherwise be on in order to reach the break even point. After that, it starts saving you money. That's about 21 days of off-time for a break even, if I did the math right.

Where I live, the rate is about half that (cheap, fish-killing hydro power), so I'm looking at about a month and a half of off-time to break even. Maybe I should get one for the heat lamp (250W) in my pumphouse. Since the temperatures here are moderate (only goes below freezing SOME nights), the actual break-even should be pretty quick.
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Mike Sokol

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Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #49 on: January 08, 2014, 08:43:20 PM »

To keep the math simple, we'll assume that the rate is $0.13/kWh. That means the ThermoCube needs to "save" 100 kWh (or 100,000 watt-hours) to pay off. With a 200W heating load (the two 100W light bulbs) it will need to be off for 500 hours that the lights would otherwise be on in order to reach the break even point. After that, it starts saving you money. That's about 21 days of off-time for a break even, if I did the math right.

Where I live, the rate is about half that (cheap, fish-killing hydro power), so I'm looking at about a month and a half of off-time to break even. Maybe I should get one for the heat lamp (250W) in my pumphouse. Since the temperatures here are moderate (only goes below freezing SOME nights), the actual break-even should be pretty quick.

Even with a 50% duty-cycle savings it would certainly pay for itself in one winter season. My dad's picking up one this week for the install. And maybe a 250-watt heat lamp is the proper heat source since the thermostat plug will cycle it off when there's enough heat. Something like http://www.tractorsupply.com/en/store/westinghouse-lighting-250w-r40-heat-lamp-incandescent-light-bulb-red should do the trick.

ProSoundWeb Community

Re: LED Lighting Power
« Reply #49 on: January 08, 2014, 08:43:20 PM »


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