Top 5 Reasons you want to replace your 1000W Metal Halide High...

Top 5 Reasons you want to replace your 1000W Metal Halide High Mast Lights with LED

There is a great opportunity to convert High Pressure Sodium and Metal Halide High Mast Lights over to LED, but what really are the true benefits? Is it worth all the hype and trouble?

Reduce your energy consumption by 60% or more

Converting to LED is a no brainer. You can easily replace a 1000W Metal Halide or HPS High mast light with a LED version that consumes between 350-400 Watts. When you take into account ballast draw of the old fixture, you are looking at an almost 66% reduction in energy consumption. But because LED’s allow for the addition of smart controls like motion sensors, turning off or turning down LEDs when no one is in the area can save you even more. LEDs are instant strike lights, that means, when you tell them to go, they go. Unlike metal halide and hps that take up to 30 minutes to restrike, LED’s are instant on and instant off, making them prime candidates for energy saving controls (read more below)

Create a brighter, safe environment

LEDs have a high “quality of light”, or better known as Color Rendering Index, or CRI for short. This is an index between 0 and 100, 0 being terrible, 100 being great. Sunlight is 100, being in a bat cave is 0. High Pressure Sodium is typically a 20-40 CRI and a color temperature of around 2700K. So very poor quality of light - that is why everything looks brown and yellow. Metal Halide is better, and some bulbs even rival that of LED, but typically they are around 60. LED is typically 70+, 80 is common. So the general rule we light to say is you need less quantity when you have better quality. And better quality makes it look brighter, and everything appears lit. Making your environment lit by LED High Mast Lights a safer working environment.

Control your lights with controls

Controls come in many forms. Some are simple fixture specific controls like motion sensors or photocells. Motion sensors turn on and off or on and dim a light, photocells turn on a light at dusk and off at dawn. But controls can be so much more. Think of LEDs as electronic lights, and add to it WIFI controls that allow you to control and monitor that light from within software. This allows you to schedule, control and monitor all your lights, turning off lights where you know no one will be around. Monitoring lights for faults - you know that a light is failing before it becomes an issue. And nothing is better than saving money than off. So embrace controls, because they will make a money saving experience even better.

Dramatically reduce your maintenance costs

LEDs will last you a long time. But what does this really mean? There seems to be two definitive ways of defining the life of an LED fixture, the LEDs themselves and everything else.

The life of an LED is usually a measurement of L70, or how long will it take the LEDs themselves to deteriorate to 70% of initial lumen output. It doesn’t mean that LEDs are dead at that point, it means they have lost 30% of their initial output. The second measurement is typically how long will the LED system work before something fails. And typically this is a measurement of how long the LED driver will last.

Some L70’s are well past 100,000 hours, and very few are rated below 50,000 hours. It can be expected that a good high quality external LED driver should last 50,000 hours. So at a bare minimum, you should expect 50,000 hours out of your LED fixture. If your high mast lights run 12 hours a night, 365 days a year, that’s 4380 hours. That means 12+ years of maintenance free life. Compare that with the life of a metal halide or high pressure sodium bulb. And keep in mind, these bulbs lose their lumens quickly. Most replace them only when they completely fail, however, most should have been replaced many months before complete failure. So if you are not replacing bulbs and ballasts, then you are saving money!

New or retrofit - you decide

There are 2 options, replace the fixtures or retrofit the fixtures. To replace a 1000W Metal Halide, figure on 44,000-52,000 of LED Lumens to do the job. And MyLEDLightingGuide can supply LED Retrofit Kits up to 47,000+ lumens. But we also carry an amazing 400 Watt LED High Mast that produces 52,000 lumens that is the perfect high mast replacement fixture. Customers who purchase this light rave at its performance and adjust-ability. It just doesn’t point down, you can adjust the lighting angle to optimize distribution. But our retrofit kits are high performance units that are DLC Premium Listed. What option would we choose? That’s a tough question. Both options are great.

source http://my-led-lighting-guide.tumblr.com/post/148715354343