Premier Lighting May 2016 Newsletter
Premier Lighting Case Study: Replacing Fluorescent Highbays with LED Fixtures


Customer Profile: 

Since 1926, Graco has been a leading provider of premium pumps and spray equipment for fluid handling in the construction, manufacturing, processing, and maintenance industries. 

Goal: 

Graco's huge manufacturing facility in Rogers, Minnesota had over six hundred fluorescent 6-lamp highbay fixtures. Maintaining over 3,600 fluorescent T8 lamps and over 1000 ballasts was a painstaking process. Graco was hoping Premier could find them an LED solution that would reduce this long-term maintenance while saving on energy costs and improving the lighting.

Solution: 

Given various LED options, Graco opted for entirely new LED fixtures that would replace the fluorescent highbays that had been there for years. These LED highbay fixtures use half the wattage per fixture and were set to last 100,000+ hours. This would essentially eliminate all the maintenance work Graco had been doing in keeping up with their existing fluorescent lighting. In addition, motion sensors were included resulting in even greater savings and longer life than they had with the fluorescent fixtures.
New DLC Premium Rating


The standards by which lighting manufacturers have been designing their luminaires has changed once more. DLC, otherwise known as the DesignLights Consortium, has created the DLC Premium Rating, an even higher classification than the standard DLC we have come to know over the last several years. This new classification is sure to attract the attention of lighting manufacturers as they continue striving to meet the highest standards in energy efficiency, for customer satisfaction as well as ensuring their products are eligible for maximum rebates from energy companies.
DLC Premium is a higher-performance classification for LED luminaires and retrofits. It is a multi-faceted classification that calls for even higher efficacy and lumen maintenance standards, as well as providing a driver ISTMT and integral controls. This is in conjunction with already meeting the minimum base requirements as outlined by the existing DLC standards. If a lighting manufacturer seeks qualification of it's products to the DLC Premium status, it will have to supply stringent testing information to demonstrate that their products meet this higher classification's added requirements.

In addition to the L70 requirement of 50,000 hours that DLC already calls for, products developed for DLC Premium classification will need to meet an L90 status of >36,000 hours. Just as with the L70 requirements, TM-21 projects will be used to evaluate the L90.
Forest Lighting UNiV8 LEDT8 Tubes With or Without Ballast

If you read our post on LED Combo Drive technology from a few months back, you know that there are LED T8 Tubes and LED PL lamps that are able to work on the existing ballast as well as without the ballast. So you can install these lamps into fixtures without changing the ballast, and then when the ballast dies off you can wire them direct as these LED lamps have internal drivers allowing them to function as a standalone. This process allows you to use the rest of the ballast's life up before converting the fixtures to run the LED T8 tubes and LED PLs with no ballast present.

Forest Lighting has put a new twist on the idea with their UniV8 LED T8 Lamps. Previously with LED T8 Combo Drive technology, when the ballast fails, the sockets would have to be changed out to non-shunted sockets. However, Forest Lighting's UniV8 LED T8 lamps are double-end power and use the same sockets, so one would simply cut out the ballast and the LED T8 lamps would work. This convenience helps limit long-term maintenance costs.
News in the Lighting World
Our mission at Premier Lighting is to provide our customers with the optimal and practical lighting solution for their facilities. We stock a complete line of commercial-grade LED and traditional light bulbs, as well as ballasts, controls, sensors, fixtures, and replacement lenses. If you have a lighting project you would like us to help with, contact us today for a free assessment. 
Premier Lighting | info@premierltg.com | 651-490-0886 | premierltg.com