Lighting up the letters
A new "task-ambient" lighting system for the United States Postal Service shows that energy-efficient lighting can make a big difference in industrial work places as well as offices.
The Berkeley Lab system was tested at sorting facilities in the Rodeo, California, post office, where carriers organize mail each day before delivering it. By improving the quality of lighting and simultaneously increasing energy efficiency, the new lighting meets two goals at once.
"To do this, we integrated a high-efficiency task lighting system with a low-level ambient lighting system and coupled these to an energy control system," says Michael Siminovitch, who led the development team.
At each station, fluorescent lamps in special fixtures reduce glare and direct more light to the work surface. A sensor turns off the task lighting directly above the sorting station when the carrier leaves.
The energy-efficient fixtures team worked closely with industry and the USPS to design the integrated system; it has met its twin goals so well that the Postal Service is developing a program for sorting facilities nationwide.
| Really cool light America's favorite floor lamp is the torchiere, which directs light upward from a bowl-shaped fixture. Unfortunately most torchieres use halogen lamps that consume hundreds of watts and burn so hot -- a thousand degrees Fahrenheit -- that they've been banned from dormitories at many universities. Berkeley Lab's efficient torchiere gives more light and distributes it more evenly, using a quarter of the power. Flicker-free light from the new generation of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) is warm to the eye but cool to the touch. The fixture is more expensive than a halogen torchiere but pays for itself in two years or less; savings on replacement bulbs (halogens last less than 18 months, while CFLs last seven years!) and electricity (2,000 kilowatt-hours in that time) amounts to hundreds of dollars. Michael Siminovitch's lighting fixtures and applications team helped make the new torchieres available commercially by staging the country's first large-scale relighting program for the dorms at Stanford University, "swapping-out" students' old halogen torchieres for the CFL models.
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- More about Michael Siminovitch's lighting research projects
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