Category: The environment
Outdoor LED Display – See it in Action!
UPDATED!! New fixtures added!
One of the fastest growing LED markets is in the Outdoor area. We’ve discussed in earlier posts how the indoor LED products are starting to come around, but for the most part, numbers don’t add up. Well in outdoor situations the numbers are a no-brainer! The hardest part about understanding LED is actually seeing it live and in person. We can tell you how a 20w LED fixture will replace a 100 watt High pressure Sodium fixture, but wouldn’t it be nice to actually see it person??? We thought so. So we built a board of LED fixtures to do just that.
Listed from Top Left being #1, to bottom right being #12. Here’s what we have:
1) RAB Lighting’s – 91 Watt Area Light. This fixture is perfect for parking lot lighting and walkway lighting throughout a facility’s property.
2) RAB Lighting’s – 13 Watt Flood/Spot Light. This fixture is perfect for lighting up a flag pole or any outdoor sign.
3) Lithonia Lighting’s – 35 Watt Wall Pack. This general purpose wall pack has an excellent beam pattern and is able to replace up to 175w Metal Halide Wall Pack fixtures.
4) Juno Lighting’s – 50 Watt Decorative Wall Pack – Polaris wall pack designed for higher end architectural look. Ultra efficient LED Fixture with a nice look to match.
5) RAB Lighting’s – 52 Watt Wall Pack – Designed to replace up to a 250w HPS / Metal Halide Wall Pack
6) RAB Lighting’s – 78 Watt Flood Light – Designed to Replace 250w to 320w Metal Halide Flood Lights. Perfect for lighting up the side of building.
7) Lithonia Lighting’s – OLW14 – 26w LED Wall Pack – Ideal above man doors on your building!
8) Lithonia Lighting’s – OLAW – 35w LED Wall/Area Light. Perfect Dusk to Dawn Fixture Replacement
9) Lithonia Lightins’s – OLW – 35w LED Wall Pack – For larger HID Replacement applications
10) RAB Lighting’s – 13w Wall Pack – Designed to replace 50w-70w HID Wall pack, above man doors.
11) RAB Lighting’s – 20w Wall Pack – Designed to replace 70w-100w HID Wall Pack
12) RAB Lighting’s – 26w Wall Pack – Designed to replace 150w HID Wall Pack
One of great features of our display is the nLight Touchpad Control. Thanks to our friends from SensorSwitch, we are able to individually control each light on the board to easily compare like fixtures. The wiring is all done over Cat5 cable, making it easy and cheap to install. This switch will individually control 16 different channels. And it looks cool to boot!
- Here’s what the inner workings look like from the back.
We’re excited to show our display to anyone who would like to see the latest and greatest in LED Fixtures on display. Stop by if you’re in town.
Questions? Comments?
Brian Huff
Adventure Lighting
515.288.0444
CFL’s Light Up The Des Moines Register
Tuesday’s edition of the Des Moines Register had a great article on the advantages of using CFL’s, or compact fluorescents, over standard incandescents. We’ve talked about CFL’s big advantages in a previous blog, but we thought it was worth mentioning the Register article, which got most things right but a few things need clarified.
The Register piece said that CFL’s use a “small” amount of mercury. While that may technically be true, the article failed to mention that mercury is harmful to people and the environment in even small quantities. So among CFL manufacturers, there are better choices, which is why we sell Philips brand CFL’s at Adventure Lighting. Their compact flourescents have at least 50% less mercury than other CFL’s without any loss of quality.
To give you a better sense of it, compare a Sylvania 800 series 4-foot T-8 lamp, which has 3.5 milligrams of mercury, to the same lamp from Philips which contains only 1.7 milligrams. We think that’s a big advantage, in terms of environmental impact.
Another point from the Register story that we take slight issue with is when it talked about how fan vibration lessens the life of CFL’s. While that’s completely true for old school incandescents – which use heated filaments that tend to break when shaken – compact flourescents create light by running an electrical current through a gas and so are much more durable and can take the shaking.
To get your two free CFL’s just subscribe to our Here’s A Bright Idea! blog, via email. We’ll send you a confirmation email and how to pick up your two free lights. No purchase is necessary, it’s just our way of saying thanks. In the coming weeks and months we’ll have other great offers for anyone who subscribes to our blog, so stay tuned.
Jack Huff, along with his son Brian and wife Sue, owns and manages Adventure Lighting in Des Moines, Iowa. For more information, go to www.adventurelighting.com
A Light That Pays You To Use It?
Since 1806, when Humphrey Davy created an electric arc between two charcoal rods connected to a battery (Thomas Edison wouldn’t patent the light bulb for another 70 years) inventors have been building brighter, longer-lasting, more energy efficient bulbs.
Today’s CFL’s (Compact Flourescent Lights) generate 20% more light yet burn 70% cooler than standard incandescents (the kind we all grew up with) and last up to 10 times longer. When you do the math (or if you’re like me, have your wife do it for you) you find out very quickly that CFL’s literally save you money, even compared to their slightly higher cost.
For example, on average, a CFL will save you $22 in a year of normal useage, compared to an incandescent. And that’s just one bulb – the average home has 30 light fixtures. Again, do the math – or better yet go to our web site, www.adventurelighting.com and use our energy savings calculator.
The other great benefit of CFL’s is their lower impact on the environment. If every homeowner in the United States replaced just one of their old-school incandescent bulbs with a CFL, it would be the energy emmisions equivalent of taking one million cars off our highways. Plus at Adventure Lighting we sell Philips brand CFL’s, which also have 30% less mercury – easier on the environment.
So whether you’re a business owner or home owner, think about retrofitting your lights – it pays in so many ways!
Brian Huff, along with Sue and Jack, own and operate Adventure Lighting in Des Moines, Iowa. For more information visit www.adventurelighting.com.
The Accidental Environmentalists
We all want to save money, especially in these very hard economic times, and any company that can help people do that is probably going to do pretty well. Little did I realize that Adventure Lighting in Des Moines, the company my wife and I bought back in 2003, would not only be accomplishing this but would also end up being on the front lines of saving the world.
That’s probably a little heavy-handed and over-dramatic but it also happens to be true! Over 30% of America’s energy costs come from lights, and those same lights account for 0ver 10% of the billions of tons of garbage that piles up in our nation’s landfills every year – so any process that helps people and businesses cut down on their energy useage and lower the number of lights they throw away, is truly doing something great for our planet.
Which is exactly what we do at Adventure Lighting, every day.
Yet I tell friends, this certainly wasn’t my goal when I bought the business in 2003. My wife Sue and I were ready to be our own boss and were also looking for something safe for our retirement – a company that sold lights seemed like a good bet. Of course I understood that energy efficiency is just good business and smart for anyone’s bottom line, business owner or home owner. But I truly had no idea that what we were really investing in was a “Green Machine,” – not of money (although we’re doing well) but of helping the environment.
And so I look back at then and look at where we’re at now and it’s ironic and amusing and yet, also rewarding – that Adventure Lighting is on the edge of the green wave, leading the way in energy efficient lighting technology. We didn’t buy the company for that reason – yet it turns out to be an even better reason.
What I will try to do with this blog, with the help of my wife Sue, my smart son Brian and the other smart, dedicated people that are part of the team at Adventure Lighting, is pass along energy saving tips, do’s and don’t when it comes to lighting, and ways to lower your energy bill – the little tricks of our trade that we’ve learned over the past 20 years in the business. And if you have some of your own, please do pass them along to us – we all want to save money, and help save the environment – even if some of us came upon the latter by accident 🙂
Jack Huff, along with his wife Sue and son Brian, own and manage Adventure Lighting in Des Moines, Iowa. For more information, visit www.adventurelighting.com
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