Truth about LED foot-candle level sales jockeys
Truth about LED foot-candle level sales jockeys
LEDs have a HUGE propensity to draw sales companies, because they're wildly expensive upfront.
It's the nectar of "percent revenue commission" sales people. They could not care less about the actual
results so long as the customers are
kept happy for a year or two after the install.
If you've been following the trend, LED sales companies pop up like weed and they have a life span of insets.
Every day, you hear foot-candle level jockey LED sales practitioner say they've sold LEDs to replace 175W metal halides and they work just as well. They can rave about dollars of savings, ROI, simple payback and they know how to milk the incentive welfare like nobody else. Ask them about the old 175W fixtures they replaced and very few can tell their head from their arse. They're the same people who sell expensive stuff we don't buy very often like cars.
Select one Lithonia 175W high-bay MH and there are four different spread width sub models. I'm showing you the narrowest and the widest. There are two additional models in between. The narrowest one provides a bright zone at 20FC while the widest one only provides 5FC. If you translate this to LED sales lingo, you quadrupled the foot candle level by magic without increasing watts, or you use a lamp with 1/4 the lumen output and you make the same FC using much less juice.
This one is for the LED 8045 you mentioned that looks like a three-eyed monster. Given that each source is made of three separate sources, be ready to get multi-edged shadows similar to camera blur.
LED sales people conveniently take FC level at points that line up with each dot and imply successful retrofit, but ignore the fact that the light distribution looks like a freaking golf ball with over-sized dimples. They've been LO
LED
You can reduce paint over-spray if uneven coating is ok. The area shown in the blue is the area you want to have an even level of foot candle. You will have better utilization with the narrow nozzle. Many Light Emitting Decoration retrofits end up like this. You have exceptionally good paint utilization, but unacceptable results. So to get even distribution you end up with the yellow oval with some over-spray. You'll have quite a bit of over-spray but good even coverage of where it needs to be flooded. Ideally you perfectly flood the blue area, but that's not realistically possible.
LED before-after comparisons seldom includes graphical representation of FC mapping or the hardness of shadows produce.
There are two things metal halide and LEDs have in common. They both lose a good percent of output during their useful time and traditional metal halide is among the WORST of all man made light sources when it comes to lamp degradation. Brand new 175W MH can put out anything from 12 to 16K lumens depending on their type. A mean lumen of 10,000 lumen is about right. Paired with a fixture efficiency of 70%, each fixture is considered a blob that puts out 7,000 lumens for design purposes.
Mirror reflector linear lamp high bays can get around 90% delivery efficiency and lamp only loses 5-10%, so this is how you can match a 175W MH with 2 F54T5HO or 3 high BF F32T8 and cut down from 200W to somewhere between 75-100W. Fluorescents work out favorably for wide angle applications.
Fluorescent lamps simply don't lose many lumens and this is how they're competitive with HIDs especially in low to medium height indoor use while LEDs have their niche in those narrow beam "flash light on a pole" type applications like parking lots.
This is the problem with the LED gimmick:
LED sales people approach businesses with aging MH lamps and offer LEDs with brand new output that barely matches the aging MH lamps, but give a perception of successful change based on "before and after" test, but those sales people are generally long gone by the time the retrofit sees their first 1,000 hour of use, and they push for payment upon completion. The initial cost of LEDs is just EXTREME. Sales people are highly motivated to sell extremely expensive useless stuff when the commission they earn is directly related to the price and their art is using every trick up their sleeves to try to justify speculated wild optimistic guesses to get the customer to front the cost.
For high mount height, high output applications where LEDs are a total joke, there are electrodeless induction metal halide lamps in production that can supposedly match 1,000W HIDs.
