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October 2016

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OCTOBER 2016 | 39 Lighting LEDs outshine previous iterations and new innovations enter the market by STACEY MCLACHLAN W hen you talk about lighting today, you're talking about LEDs. While a few years ago, they may have only come into the conversation when talk veered to sus- tainability, today's LEDs are more than just a token energy-efficient element of a project; they're designed to perform beautifully and look great doing it. There's plenty of reasons that LEDs are the light of choice right now. Ben Rajewski, engineer at Williams Engineering Canada, credits the ever increasing popularity of LEDs not just to the high efficiency, but to the low maintenance requirements, too. "Almost all projects, from small restaurants to massive recreation centres are going with the majority of the fixtures as LED, and this will continue." But there's likely a top-down pressure at play in this as well, as the new National Energy Code of Canada for Buildings (NECB) that comes into effect in Alberta on November 1 has everyone shifting towards energy efficiency. But even for those who aren't feeling the pressure from the NECB, the affordabil- ity of new LED lamps make it the preferred option. "Now that the LED lamp prices are at a reasonable level, many are shifting towards the technology," says Rajewski. And this is only going to get better over time, says Emma Cronin, marketing co- ordinator for Nemetz (S/A) & Associates Ltd., as performance ramps up substan- tially with each new generation. "There's been a constant improvement of LED in terms of better performance with lower energy consumption." "LED is the tech of today," agrees Barry Fagen, president at Peerless Electric Company Ltd. "It's a total shift to LED." That shift is moving beyond the bulb and into the design of the fixture itself. "It's merging," explains Fagen. "We're supplying integrated board and circuits." Where you're currently able to swap out an incan- descent for a more energy-efficient option, in the future, things might not be so easy. "If you had a table lamp and wanted it to be warmer or brighter, you bought a new lightbulb – now you buy a whole fixture," says Fagen. Modern LEDs are certainly more varied than the options of the early days, a response to the increasing demands from homeowners and architects for more energy-efficient lighting that still looks great. "There's dim to warm LEDs, and dynamic whites," says Cronin. Or, if you can't choose, tunable white LED fixtures allow tuning the white colour temperature of the fixture from the warm white spec- trum to the cool blue-white spectrum. Rajewski notes that architects are increasingly asking for fixtures with a high colour rendering index (CRI), concerned with the overall quality of the light, and not just at the lumen output numbers. "Glare and colour consistency are now being ana- lyzed carefully to ensure that clients are being provided with high-quality, comfort- able lighting for whatever space they are in," says Rajewski. "Overall the emphasis on quality lighting has increased dramatically as everyone has become more famil- iar with LED technology." Realistically, while we could just reduce the amount of lights overall or replace everything with hyper-efficient bulbs, we still need our light to be functional and beautiful. "The mantra is 'LED! LED! LED!' There are places they're wonderful, but there are also places they're not – they're not a one-size-fits-all solution," says Betty Lou Pacey, president of BL Innovative Lighting. "You need a certain amount of light- ing for path areas, and you want to have the right kind of lighting and the right amount of lighting so you don't think the lipstick you thought was red is now orange." A control system offers the best for day-to-day use, while still greatly improving effi- ciency – the best of both worlds. "The only way you can maintain levels for usability while also conserve energy is controllable lighting," Pacey points out. But the real next big thing in lighting may have nothing to do with bulbs at all. "We're at a time where lighting and video technology are starting to converge," says Jonathan Labbee, EVP and CMO of Saco Technologies. "High-speed video protocols open up a myriad of opportunities." Because when a pixel from a video screen is used to illuminate a space, it has a precision and speed that a standard bulb can't offer. Saco invented the LED video screen, so it's no surprise that the company is at the forefront here with their line of Shockwave video lighting systems. Not only does it dim more smoothly than a typical LED light – which often has awkward stepping – it also provides opportunities for interactivity. "It's something that I think is a natural evolution of things," says Labbee. With these lights, motion sensors or light can trig- ger colour change, and perishable information (like time, temperature or the score of something) can also be used as an input. "Say you're in a sports bar, if your favou- rite team scores, the light could display the team colours," he says. "It becomes kind of live. At the end of the day, it's all about driving the user experience." Light On Shockwave video lighting system from Saco Technologies. Lighting the way with BL Innovative Lighting.

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