480V: what sense?

[Francesco]

Good morning guys,
let me introduce myself. I work in our factory based in North Italy, we have been manufacturers of LED street/industrial lamps for over 4 years.
I'm dealing with the certification of our products, in order to present them to the US market. I'm wondering if offering 347-480V option for our lamps could be a good idea. Having read many topics on this question here, I'd say that for high bay fixtures, 480V makes sense... less v drop, more fixtures on each line, less cables to run... isn't it?

What if we talk of... parking lots????

I'd like to know your opinion.. let me know!

Francesco

 

[broadgage]

It would seem desireable to have your products certified for use on 480 volt nominal circuits.

A fairly common arrangment in the USA for larger premises is to have a 3 phase 4 wire supply at 277/480 volts. A lot of existing lights are 277 volt connected phase to neutral, and use copper/iron ballasts for HID lamps.

New LED equipment intended as retrofits for existing HID lights could be connected for 277 or for 480.

For new installations rather than retrofits, 480 volts would probably be prefered since no neutral would be needed thereby saving material.
I would expect that the electronic ballasts/driver circuits would be very slightly more efficient on 480 volts than on 277. The difference would be exceedingly small, less than 1%, but over say 25 years of all night operation could be worthwhile.
Even a saving of 0.1 watt is worthwhile in the very long tem.
25 years of all night operation is roughly 100,000 hours, saving 0.1 watt over that time is about 10KWH, or several $ per lamp.