Lab Design Webinar
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The lighting industry has seen rapid changes in the past 10 years. These changes not only impact how laboratory facilities are designed but also how they are operated and maintained. After attending this seminar, you will understand how quality lighting can reduce energy consumption, improve speed and accuracy of task performance and improve employee well-being. Luminaires, lighting controls, and lighting metrics will all be reviewed to help lab managers and users communicate their lighting needs to design professionals. Specialty laboratories often have specialized lighting requirements that differ from standard laboratory lighting parameters. Some of these specialty needs will be discussed in an interactive Q&A session.
Speaker
Karen Murphy, LC, IALD, LEED AP
Lighting Director
HDR
Hello everyone, welcome to lead manager slab design webinar series. My name is Marybeth de Donna and I'll be moderating today's discussion, laboratory lighting how technology is changing design and operations. We like our webinars to be very interactive, so we encourage you to submit your questions to us at any point during today's webinar. Our speaker will address these questions during the question and answer session following her presentation. To ask a question or leave a comment, simply type your query into the q&a box on the right hand side of your screen.
We will try to address as many questions as possible during our time together. But if we happen to run out of time, I will forward any unanswered questions to today's speaker and she can respond to you directly if possible. I would like to remind you that this webinar recording will be available on demand shortly following the slide presentation, so please watch her an email from land manager and how to access this free video once it's available.
This presentation is brought to you by our partners at Poly Science. at Poly Science. Our award winning line of precise temperature control equipment has been manufactured in the United States for 60 years with the same core values in mind, quality, reliability, durability, and sustainability. Our patented technology and innovative environmentally friendly features provide you with easy to use safe and precise temperature control.
Serving every continent in the world. We are here to manufacture the trusted equipment that will help deliver the results that you need to be successful. To find out more visit poly science.com. And there are also handouts available in the handouts section on the right hand side of your screen. So with that, I'd like to introduce our presenter for today's webinar. Karen Murphy is a certified specialist in lighting design with over 30 years of project experience and tenure with HDR.
She has published numerous articles presented at various professional seminars been recognized as an expert witness and her work has been recognized with awards and future publications. Karen has presented at the Illuminating Engineering Society annual conference on multiple occasions, most recently in 2020, where she discussed lighting design as it was is and will be as well as the Lightfair International in 2019, where she spoke about how dynamic lighting is art, health and good business she provides lighting that supports visual performance enhances design concepts promotes energy efficiency, and respects operational and maintenance concerns. Karen understands lightings role in creating healthy environments that support both psychological and physiological health. Her work blends the art and science of lighting to create enduring environments that respect and uphold the goals of her clients. Karen, thanks for joining us today.
Thank you for having me. And thank everyone for attending today and giving us you know, an hour of your time. It's much appreciated. I'm hoping to share some of my enthusiasm for lighting with everyone answer any questions that you might have. But specifically, this presentation is geared to lighting for laboratories and how technology is changing that design and and operations today. And so you know, with the without introduction, just a little bit of background on HDR HDR is a fully integrated multi multidisciplinary design practice, ranked number three globally and the architectural practice and number one in science and technology as well as healthcare.
So I've been doing these this building type for over 30 years. And like I said, a lot of things have changed, a lot of things have stayed the same. And so we want to go through lighting today and why lighting is so important in laboratories. We're going to talk about the importance of lighting and laboratories to how the technology has changed through the years, specifically fluorescent versus led and what those changes are that you need to know.
So that you're designing spaces that are appropriate for the new technology, the importance of lighting controls all the new lighting technology and metrics that are out there that came along with the advent of LED technology. And then specifically, we're going to apply all of those things to laboratory designs, more specifically. And then at the end, I'm here to answer any questions that you have. Hopefully I'll be able to.
So we're starting with how lighting affects spaces, you know, and spaces in general, we know a well designed space has a lot of positive benefits for the people in the space as well as the companies that operate the space. But lighting affects how spaces look, feel and function. So we understand well designed spaces are important. And my point is that lighting is part of being of being a well designed space. It's also very, very important with our push to zero as we try to get more and more energy efficient.
You know, that brought in the whole advent of LED technology in trying to lower the watts per square foot that the lighting systems are operating with, has really brought to the forefront that LED technology but there's a lot of things that have changed with LED technology and we want to review those today. So as you go forward, you know, the quote from Louis Kahn kind of says it says it all, as it relates to lighting, but humans experience light through through separate and distinct neurological pathways that we'll talk about. But understanding the relationship between light and human is the art of lighting.
So, it's often said that lighting is both an art and a science and understanding our relationship with light is the art of lighting. And then understanding some of those technological differences that I talked about between LED technology, fluorescent technology, like that goes to the science. So we're gonna be talking about both today. Again, specifically, light and the human interaction with light, there's two distinct neurological pathways that the humans respond to light, and there's the visual system, and our visual system responds to light. And all of those signals travel through the visual cortex.
There's also just since 2005, we've known about the influence that light has on circadian, supporting the support system for circadian rhythms. And that pathway is a completely different pathway travels through the super, super, super charismatic nucleus. Taking a completely different pathway through our bodies controls a lot of hormone functions and stuff, I could give an hour seminar just on circadian supportive lighting, that's really not what we're going to concentrate on today.
Today, we're really concentrating on the visual system and visual cortex, speed and accuracy of task performance, how you can assess material assessment, color, texture, navigation cues within a bill within a building spatial perceptions and eyestrain, right, all of these things are important in the laboratory environment, and getting them right. And so it's also important to say to understand that there's not a single one solution that fits every laboratory environment, every lab is different. And it needs to be designed for the tasks that are being performed in that space.
So if you're joining this conference, or this, this webinar, hoping to get like this is what I need to do, and I need to apply it to my labs, I'm afraid you're going to be sorely disappointed. I'm not giving you one solution that works everywhere. It's really about understanding what functions are needed, and designing the light that responds to those functions.
But the good news is that there are certain parameters, certain considerations that haven't changed, and technology hasn't hasn't changed these. And these are the same today as they were 30 years ago. And so uniformity of tasks is important in the lab, the speed and accuracy of task performance in a lab is critical. And having good uniform light across the surface allows your eyes to move along the surface. And to quickly and consistently be able to perform tasks. What you don't want to have is a lot of shadows, where there's light and dark patches, because what that happens is it makes your pupil readjust right.
And so your eyes are constantly adapting and re adapting to the amount of light they're receiving. And it's going to cause eyestrain, and it and it can hinder test performance. So uniformity and the elimination of Shadows is really, really important in the laboratory environment. Now, when we talk about that, and uniformity of of illumination, everyone always thinks horizontal illumination, which absolutely is important. So the horizontal illumination on your bench surfaces on your work surfaces is very, very important.
But in a laboratory environment, there's also a critical component of the vertical illumination laboratory environments typically have a lot of shelving. And so those shelves have to have the proper light on the shelves, you know, think about a librarian lighting the bookshelves, right? It's the same thing that you want to do in a laboratory. You need both the horizontal and the vertical illumination in order to increase test performance.
The other thing that you want to be careful of is glare. Glare is a disabling feature, right? Like so there's nuisance glare and there's disabling glare. A nuisance glare is just kind of like, I don't like that. But it disabling glare actually stops you from seeing something. So think about when you're driving in your car at night and the other car's headlights are coming right at you.
If you look at the headlights, you can't see anything around it, it temporarily blinds you and so that's a disabling glare. And so a lot of times you kind of like look away avert avert your gaze until that car passes and then you look back at the road and you can see fine. So we want to avoid any sources of glare in the in the laboratory. Typically that's usually daylight you know, right coming in from windows, anything that's that bright. It's a very, very bright Point Source.
But now with LED technology, LEDs are very, very bright point sources, we want to make sure that they're always the LED technologies don't have a clear lens that you're seeing those very, very bright individual point modules that there's always a diffuse white lens that's gonna spread the light out to mitigate that glare impact from from the source directly. And then there's another type of glare that's called veiling reflection. And availing reflection is just glare. That is, instead of from directly from the source, it's clear that bounces off another object.
And so we saw this several years ago, when computers were first introduced to the workplace, right, and everyone's computer monitor, all of a sudden, there were words that you couldn't see, because all you were seeing was the reflection of the light that was up on the ceiling on your computer monitor. And so again, that's a disabling glare, right, you couldn't see your full screen it was preventing you from seeing. So in the laboratory environment, you know, our screens, and our laptops have gotten much better at mitigating those failing reflections.
But there still are computers, electronics devices in the labs that you need to be aware of where those veiling reflections might come into play. There's also some considerations that I don't have a cubecart character cartoon for, but they still apply. And these are always applied to labs, and they continue to apply to labs. And one of these is cleanliness, right. So different labs have different requirements for cleanliness, you have to understand what the what the cleanliness requirement for the laboratory is. And then design your fixtures appropriately. And hopefully, the ceilings to not just you don't want a sealed fixture in an exposed ceiling. It's kind of counterintuitive, right? If you if you're going through that effort to seal the fixture to make sure that no contaminants come through the fixture into the space, you also want to have a ceiling.
The other thing is flexibility. We've seen this become more and more of a priority in labs that they want to be able to move the equipment, and sometimes even the benches around and reorganize and change, change the shelves, how many shelves whether there are shelves. So flexibility has become a really key element to laboratory design. And then safety. You know, above all else, the labs have to be safe and having proper illumination and emergency elimination. If you have a power outage, you know is that aren't are your researchers left in total darkness? Or is there is there some emergency lab so that they can safely put down the tasks that the equipment that they're working on and get out of the building?
Sorry, so
sorry, I'm having trouble speaking. But in general, you know, laboratories have changed. And so we need to talk about how technology is changing the way we design laboratories. And it's not just you know, you can see it in this photo, that the equipment in the laboratories is really driving that change. But it's not just the equipment, right, I'm not a lab planner. So I'm not here to talk about the equipment changes that have been happening through the through the years, but I do want to talk about the technology changes as they relate to lighting.
And so the best illustration of those, that technology change that I you know, could come up with was these two photos, you know, of laboratory buildings, you know, years ago and the laboratory building today and you can see instantly, just how the design has changed. Specifically, we're going to be talking about lighting and the lighting evolution. And so I want to take a little bit of time to kind of explain fluorescent technology and explain the differences between fluorescent technology and LED lighting today.
So with the fluorescent technology, it required the electrical currents to pass through filament. It excited the gases that were inside the glass bulb of the lamp. In with fluorescent technology, those gases created ultraviolet light. That glass bulb was coated with a phosphor and it's actually try phosphor coating that would convert the ultraviolet light into the visible light spectrum and then pass out, you know, emanate from the from the bulb. as visible light LED technology is completely different. It's operating more like your cell phone. It is little individual LED diodes. They can be specific colors.
Or they could be white, they can pass through a phosphor that changes that one individual color to full spectrum color. And so there's a lot of different ways and different types of light, the fluorescent technology and the fluorescent bulbs were always the same, right the same, there were multiple manufacturers that produce the exact same bulb, and you could buy any manufacturer, you could buy GE Sylvania, Philips, you know, whoever you wanted to, and put it in any fixture that you bought, they were interchangeable. LED technology does not have that standardized package.
They are being created by every lighting manufacturer who's putting out LED lighting fixtures. And so when you go to re lamp, the LED fixtures, you need to go back to that manufacturer to get the lamp or the diode in this case. So you can there's just three different examples along the bottom. And this is not a complete list. You know, there's there's many, many on the markets and there's tape, there's fixtures in the center, you can see very clearly the importance of the heat sink. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. But the LED modules are very small and very flat, but they need they need that heatsink to operate correctly. And so we'll go into into those discussions.
Without, we're gonna go right to the heat discussion first. So this is a illustration of what we were just talking about. So the old technologies, specifically incandescent and HRD, and to a lesser extent, fluorescent, but they radiated heat from that glass bulb enclosure, the heat would radiate out. LED technology operates completely differently, they conduct heat. And so the heat typically comes out the back of the fixture, it's conducted away from the from the LED, it doesn't radiate, it's it's conducted.
Good thing is right, it doesn't add heat to the space, it's putting it up in the plenum, where it could be exhausted and taken away. What's really important to understand is that heat is critical to preserving the life of an LED, the junction temperature of the LED has to stay below 132 degrees. If that junction temperature exceeds 130 degrees Fahrenheit, the LED module is going to fare and again I said before, think about your cell phone. So if you're sitting on the beach with your cell phone, and your cell phone starts to get hot, right, it automatically shuts down. It's the same, you know, similar principle that happens with LED technology. So you don't want to use LED technology in extremely high heat environments.
Where you do a lot of times they have built in safety factors that just like your phone will shut it down, as opposed to having the whole module fail, they'll shut it down to protect itself. The good news is that LEDs love cold temperatures, they perform very, very well. And so in this chart, you can see the chart on the left shows you fluorescent technology, both T eight and T five. And so you can see the TA technology had its optimum performance, you know, right around room temperature, the tea five was a little a little warmer, like that even a little bit warmer, you know, was in that range. But in the cold temperatures, the performance plummeted.
So using fluorescent technologies and freezers and cold rooms is always a problem, you have always had to have more fixtures because the output that you were getting from the from those lamps dropped off dramatically as the temperature dropped. Now if you look at the chart on the right, that's the chart for LED technology. And you can see that as that that temperature gets colder, the performance increases, it will provide more than the rated lumen output for it for that source at very cold temperatures. And so it's really really good for freezers not so good and hot environments.
The other difference key difference that I always like to point out is please and I tell my clients please avoid using LED replacement lamps. There's again the heat dissipation problem right that the fixtures not is not designed to conduct heat. The same way you know for an old fluorescent or an incandescent fixture as it is for an LED fixture. The fixture is designed to dissipate the heat correctly and get the maximum life out of the lamp. The other thing is the distribution and the beam angles are different.
So an LED replacement fixture does not distribute light the same way as the fluorescent does. And so again thinking about that fluorescent tube, the phosphors are 360 It's gas inside the lights come Coming out all around the LED fluorescent replacement tubes have almost like a tape. You know, if you remember the other picture back a couple slides ago of the tape light, there are diodes inside of that tube that direct the light out. But it is not a true 360 degree spread. And so the lights not coming out. So the fixture has reflectors in it that are designed to capture the light coming out in 360 degrees and distribute them into the space and spread that light out.
The lights coming out of the lamp at different angles. And so the reflector system that's part of that fixture, that old fixture is not optimally working for your replacement bulbs. The other thing is that when when the LED fluorescent replacement lamps first came out, there were numerous product recalls, and fires and problems. And part of it was because some were designed to work with ballasts, some were designed, you had to take the ballast out some needed a, you know a post start socket, some needed the Rapid Start socket, and people were just taking out the lamp and putting them in not knowing all of the other factors that had to be accounted for in order to avoid these problems.
They've since the people that are still producing these sources have worked through a lot of a lot of logistics, and it has gotten a lot better. But there are still a lot of steps and a lot of precautions that you need to investigate before you implement. So I'm gonna kind of just put that out there as a warning, you know, make sure it's not just a take the lamp out, put a new lamp in, you need to check your sockets, you need to check your ballasts and provide accordingly.
Also dimming compatibility, so the dimming of LEDs is dependent upon the driver for the LED. With all of these replacement lamps, the driver for an LED is is integral into the equipment. When you specify an LED fixture, that fixture selection provides both the LED module and the LED driver and it usually gives you a couple of options for what types of LED drivers you want. And so as a designer, you can specifically pick what driver you're going to be using and make sure that your dimming system then is compatible with that type of driver. With the LED replacement lamps. They never identify the type of driver that's integral to that fixture. And so how you can identify the compatibility is extremely difficult.
There's a couple of dimming manufacturers that have tested lamps and lamp products by manufacturer and product number and they will identify this dimming switch will operate Phillips number Baba and and give you how many fixtures with the minimum number of fixtures with the maximum number of fixtures are that can be operated off that one dimmer. But I will say and I have seen this in the field is that the manufacturers change those products. And they don't necessarily update the product numbers. We went through this entire exercise testing the compatibility. And in the field when they were installed the risk flicker. We went back and said How's this possible? You tested it, it worked.
When we went back and investigated with the lamp manufacturer, they identified that they had updated that product code right and that push to have more lumens less wattage, right better energy savings, better efficacy of the lamps. They changed the system, but they kept the product number the same. So there was no way as a designer for for myself to know or for the dimming control company to know that that product had changed. The type of driver in it was never is never identified in literature. So again, warning.
Some key differences between fluorescent and LED and this is going to violate everything that you've ever learned in math class, right? So we're always told the first thing you have to do when you're evaluating things is get the units right, right, like so if you're if your units are right, you can compare numbers if your units are the same, you can compare numbers. Unfortunately, that's not true for product life.
So a fluorescent product life is based upon the time it takes 50% of the lamps to fail. And that's the hours that are given this product will ask so many hours. For an LED source, the product life is based upon how long it takes that product to lose 30% of the of the light output, because LED technology will get dimmer and dimmer and dimmer over time. Until way out in the future, it fails, but it will lose a lot of light before it actually fails.
Unless it overheats, right? Unless that junction temperature or you know has a surge or something goes wrong. So it's either going to fail instantly, or it's going to last a really, really long time and just produce less and less light. And so the life is based on getting down the losing 30% of the output. For decorative lighting. It's even worse though decorative lighting. If you have a sconce somewhere or low level accent lights, stuff like that life is defined as the time it takes to lose 50% of the output.
Now one of the things that they the IRS has said and that led manufacturers when they first came out, they said, you know they're testing it, and they're not reaching that 30% It takes a long time to reach that 30% appreciation, right? A lot of products have a 50,000 hour rating. And so that could take, you know, five years to achieve, but they want to get this product on the market. So how can they test and publish that data when it would take five years for them to test and have the data.
So part of the IES requirements, the test method project standards for developing the life has said that you can use an algorithm to extrapolate beyond your test period. But we will not let allow you to extrapolate more than six times your actual testing. And so because LED products lasts so long, and if you have a really good heatsink built up in them, they can last up to 100,000 hours. And that still requires a long testing period.
So in the chart below here for the LED performance, you'll see this was taken right out of the manufacturers literature. And this is for an exterior lighting fixture. But they will identify what the L 70 value is. And that's what it will reach at 70. At 70%. You know, and they have the rated life, they're the new the calculated rated life. But they will also give, they may give you might see an L add life rating. So they can only extrapolate six times. So when they multiply six times, they're not down to 70%.
Yet, they're at 80% lumen depreciation. So they can only pump they can publish that life of 50,000 hours, right. But they don't want people to think that they've hit 70% or 30% Depreciation at 50,000 hours, they want people to know that they're still at 80%. So that's when you'll see like an L ad. And that's what that means that they haven't gone all the way down that you know, I'm only allowed to publish six times. So that's 50,000 hours. But I'm not at a 70% Depreciation I met your or 70% output I met an 80% output.
So that's what some of those numbers mean. Hopefully, that's understandable. What that means as far as once we start performing calculations is when we calculate a space, we're always calculating the maintained average illumination for space. We don't want to calculate the initial right and then have that illumination drop off and then all of a sudden, you know a couple hours and a couple of years in you're you're not getting enough light in your space, we want your space to have the proper illumination throughout the life of that product right until it's time to re lamp. So we base our calculations on life.
If we do that, with fluorescent the depreciation the lamp lumen depreciation of a fluorescent by the time it reached its end of life, which was when 50% of the lamps would fail. The lamps that were still operating had only lost 5% of their output. So the numbers that the difference between the initial and the maintained were much less than they are with LED right a 5% Depreciation is much different than a 30% depreciation.
And to illustrate that, you know, I bring up these examples. So if you were to design using a 70% depreciation for a quarter, you're designing for an average of 10 foot candles. Initially, you'll have 14 foot candles in the space no winds gonna object, or most people won't notice the difference between four foot candles within a laboratory, where you're designing for 100 foot candles on the bench, initially, you'll have 143 foot candles, almost one and a half times the amount of light that you're really designing the space for. And that's a big difference. And
that's definitely. Okay. So slide 20, we're talking about controls and the importance of lighting controls. And lighting controls can actually help mitigate some of that difference between the initial and maintained and the variation in the light. In light levels, it's important to know that when you dim LED technology, you are saving energy, so and it's very, very linear until you get down to the very end of the, the lower end of the dimming percentage.
So if you didn't the light 70%, you're saving 30% of the energy, where the difference occurs is in that lower end of the spectrum, and there's different types of LED drivers. So there's typically a 10% and a 1%. Sometimes there are some 5% drivers out there, but 10%, or 1% are the most common drivers. But as you can see in the chart on the left, if you dim take a 10% dimming driver, you're actually the perceived light and space will be 32%. Down at 1%, you're closer to 10% light output.
So what I like to tell people is that using 10% dimming drivers is fine for daylight harvesting or to make people feel good that they have you know adjustability of light in your space. But if you really need to darken a room, you want 1% There's even some drivers out there that call themselves 0% You want that x you know the added expense, right? So every you know better technology costs more.
But you want that added expense of the 1% or 0% dimming driver. And there are some labs where dimming, the lights are really, really important for the electronic microscopes and things that are happening in the lab. Understanding the controls is really, really important. I kind of talked about this a little bit earlier. But the the LED driver needs to be paired with the control device.
Part of things that can happen if the devices aren't paired properly, you will have the lights might pop on or drop off all of a sudden, there might be you know, if you're moving the dimming slider up and down, there might be a trap what they call a dead band travel where you're the dimmers moving, but nothing's happening. And then all of a sudden the lights catch up. And flicker can also occur, most common at the low end of the dimming scale. But it can occur at any range. So you want to make sure you know that the devices are paired properly.
These are just some questions that I put together that I always asked and I think any design team should always ask before they dim LED products. So is this an LED lamp or is it an LED fixture right. And this goes back to what I talked about before with those replacement lamps. If it's an LED replacement lamp, you may not be able to identify what type of driver it is. And there's going to be a lot of risk involved, you know, there's going to be a lot of investigation, a lot of you know, deep into product websites that you're you're going to have to go to get some product details on that product.
If it's an LED fixture, that dimming driver and the type of dimming drivers that that product comes with are right there on the cut sheets, very easy, very clear for you to make sure that your products are compatible. And then what is the dimming range? So that's what we just kind of talked about don't do you want the 10% dimming 1% down there like what is the dimming range that you need? How dark do you need the space to get? Will that light distribution remain smooth and continuous? All right.
So you want it to be a smooth continuous you don't want it to be a stepped process, a jumpy process. And that's all in getting the compatibility correct between the control device and the driver. And then what type of dimming controller was that product designed for right like again goes to the compatibility. What is the minimum and maximum number of fixtures that can be controlled from anyone dinner. And sometimes this is different. You'll see that incandescent and sometimes if you have an incandescent dimmer, they require a minimum load.
So you have to have at least 25 Watts sometimes up to 40 watts of a minimum load for that dimmer to operate properly. And with LED technology, especially when you're swapping out incandescent for for LED, sometimes it's tough to get all the way up to that 40 Watt minimum Who talked a lot about technology, and fluorescence and your specific overall lighting technology and how lighting technology has changed.
But there's also with that change in technology, there's also been some new metrics added. So the first one that we're going to talk about is color. And there's two dominant color metrics that are used in the industry, color, temperature and color rendering index. And so the color temperature is what you see when you look at the light source. The color rendering index is how you perceive color variation of objects in our space. Now, these two metrics, and we'll go into specifically, what they mean and show examples of them have been replaced by new metrics, not color, temperature, still color temperature.
But the new there's a new metric for color rendering index, which is color fidelity. And in addition to color fidelity, there's a new metric called color gamut. Talk about those. But first, we're going to talk about color temperature. So again, color temperatures, when you look at the light, what color do you see, and there's a range of possibilities. The higher the number and measured in degrees Kelvin, the higher the numbers, the bluer the light, right, which is almost like the higher the number, the cooler the light, the lower the number, the warmer the night, which seems counterintuitive, but think about it like a fire.
And the hottest part of the fire is the blue flame. So that kind of helps put put these numbers in perspective. The other important thing to know about color temperature is that color temperature is reported by standards, like it's not a specific number. And it's not an exact number that's reported, the color temperature bins. And so as they go through, and they evaluate the LED modules, they put them into categories. So this is closest to the 2700 Kelvin, this is closest to 3000 Kelvin and part of the 3000. And so how far away any particular module can be from the number that it's been assigned or bend into is part of the standard deviation. So there's an SD cm, standard deviation color matching index.
And it's based on you know how many macadam ellipses away from that particular wear that color occurs on the black body radiator, how many color steps away is. And so ENERGY STAR allows a seven step color variation, which you can see from the chart on the right is a 2700 Kelvin product with an Energy Star rating could be pretty close to a 3000 Kelvin project or product. And so seven steps, in my opinion is a little too much for most applications, we typically I will typically spec a three step macadam ellipse. And if we have a very specific color sensitive project, or finishes, or that we want to light a white wall, something where the lights really going to be noticeable.
We might may even go down to two step. exterior lighting for step is fine, you know for your parking lots and things like that. Now how the next metric is color rendering index. And it's important to note that the color rendering index is tied to the color temperature. So just because a product has a color rendering index of 80 doesn't mean that it will render the colors the same way as another product with a color rendering index of ad that has a different color temperature. And so I put these examples up to kind of demonstrate that. And both of these examples are old illustrations that I've been using for years and it's with fluorescent technology, but the
application applies to LEDs as well. So with the fluorescent technology, you can see a 75 CRI with a 3000 Kelvin color temperature has a really hard time rendering the blue class. But that same seven five CRI with a 4100 Kelvin color temperature renders the blue class very well but has a hard time rendering the red and in the apple. So the colors are even though the color rendering index is the same. The colors are not rendered the same. And that's based on the color temperature. Now you can see where you have the same color temperature, but improved color rendering so enough 3000 Kelvin, color temperature, which is a warm source, and a poor color rendering 75, you can see it has trouble rendering the blue.
But as that color rendering improves, the blue improves, you see much more improvement in the blue than the red, the red is pretty consistent. So that's kind of how you know what that all means. What we have noticed, and why the new metrics have come out is that the color rendering index was only testing eight sample colors. And it was averaging them out. So it was an average of eight colors. And it produced a lot of variations. So the photo on the bottom is an actual installation. And this is an LED product where both fixtures in the photo have the same published color temperature, and the same published color rendering index, but you can see that they're actually rendering colors very differently. And that's because only eight color samples are part of the average, the new metric that came out with the IASTM 30 is color fidelity.
And so color fidelity is changing that color rendering index, which was eight color samples to be 90 color samples, or not, I'm sorry, 99 color samples that are averaged together over time. The other major difference is that the old color rendering index, change the reference source. So the samples and how well the colors rendered or compared to a reference source. So incandescent, you know, at lower, lower color temperatures, the color rendering was compared to an incandescent source at higher color temperatures that was compared to daylight, the new metric does not change sources.
So it's not changing the reference. It's always based on your blackbody radiator. So the reference source, there's no specific step or jump in scale that you might see when that averaging occurs. And then I have another slide that kind of shows you the other metrics that they developed, when they developed the improved color fidelity, which is, you know, larger testing method, keeping the reference source consistent, they developed a metric called color gamut. And this is a measure a measure of the saturation.
One of the nice things about these new metrics is that they also provide a pictorial graphic, which we're seeing, you know, in the color picture that circle. So the top photo, and that top circle is a very high color fidelity, and a very high color. And in good color gamut that's 100%, or close to 100% color gamut. And so that is what the colors are supposed to look like they're not oversaturated, they're not under saturated, it's what we would call ideal like that should be the ideal reference. The next step down, you can kind of see that the dotted line pushes outside the circle. So they are oversaturating, you can see that color gamut is now above 100. So that's a very, very saturated colors, they want those colors to pop.
Usually when that happens, there's, there's, it's like a balloon, right? If you if you squeeze it out, it's gonna go in somewhere. So you're gonna lose a little color on one end, but you're really going to make another color pop. And by that color graphic, you can kind of determine which color is going to is going to pop in which ones are going to be less saturated. The bottom graphic is the opposite the balloons kind of pushed in and so it's under saturated. The can the gamut is below 100 degrees. And so those colors do not pop like they do in the saturated version. And so this is used a lot in retail stores, right like the Levi's stores can actually super saturate the blues and have the jeans really pop like but in a laboratory environment.
We don't want to over exaggerate colors we want true color rendering. So we really want to look for products that have color gamut graphic similar to that top, you know, ideal circle so again, we're trying to get through this as there's some questions but applying this to labs right, bringing this all back to laboratory design. There's still color rendition uniformity, shadows, horizontal and vertical illumination, glare, veiling reflections, cleanliness, flexibility, maintenance, control, all of these things need to be considered when You're talking about lighting design and the lighting design considerations for spaces.
We also want to start talking about access to daylight, right? People like to have those views to nature. But we don't want that direct impact on the lab benches, right, we don't want direct glare, we don't want that heat are those the shadows to current on onto the lab bench. It also daylight is great for color consistency, it's better than any, you know, any artificial source can be. So your color consistency is great if you have something like spaces.
But we also want to make sure that the color consistency in the lighting products in the laboratory environment is consistent so that if you're working in a bench or in a biosafety, or in a in a fume hood, or in a biosafety cabinet, that you're getting the same results as if you were out on the open bench top surface. So the color qualities and color consistency of the products in the ceiling fixture should be the same as the lights that are in the hood, the same header on the task lights and the shelving.
And a lot of times those things are specified by different people. So you really have to have an advocate, a lighting specialist that's reviewing and identifying what those metrics need to be. So they're consistent in all the lighting products in a space. Another consideration that you really need to consider when you're talking about laboratory design, is visual relief. laboratory spaces are very, very bright.
People need a space to get away from that brightness, you need some visual relief throughout the day, you need to be able to go out and take a break. And so when you step outside of that lab, are you providing those opportunities for that break? Specialty Equipment, labs are full of specialty equipment. And specialty equipment, sometimes has specialty lighting needs.
So when we're talking about specialty equipment, like do you need dimming, or their electronic microscope, dimming uni warning lights outside your lane, using lasers, warning lights, or precautions. Fourth is to tell people not to come in. Does your equipment have enclosures that might be blocking the light that the light is of only up in the ceiling? You know, are you still getting to the tasks that need to be done? Their equipment concealed and enclosures? Do you have robotics, you know and your robotics going to be operating 24 hours a day, if so you might not want to use occupancy sensors or your lights are going to be on you know if the ox sensors are so sensitive that they detect that movement of the of the robotics equipment and might be holding your lights on when you don't really use the lights on it.
There's also some labs that have spectral wavelength filtering that's required for certain functions. And again, let's think of dark rooms right when you're processing film. Sometimes there were specific wavelengths that you needed to filter out for the processes that you were doing. So we've designed spaces where we specifically filtered the wavelength and had switches, the occupants could work in white light and switch it off to the filtered light when they needed it. UV filtration is big in a lot of labs, and a lot of times I will get the requirements like oh, we need UV light. And I'm like well, do you need UV light? Or do you need UV filtered light?
Because there's two different things. So UV filtered light was always done typically to prevent ultraviolet disinfection light cell cultures and things where you're trying to grow microbes, right? You don't want ultraviolet light that would kill those microbes. When you're trying to grow. You might want UV disinfection to kill microbes that are in your lab. So it's important to know do you want UV disinfection light? Or do you want UV filtered light. And a lot of times, you know again, people will say they need UV filtered light but LED technology is giving you that inherently. Unlike fluorescent remember that fluorescent created ultraviolet light, and it was after passed through the phosphors that it turned to visible light.
So there was ultraviolet light in all fluorescent sources and all fluorescent fixtures. There is not ultraviolet light inherently in LED products. So that's an important distinction to understand. We've also done some laser labs where the users wanted colored light to better see and set up the lasers and the different types of lasers and equipment they were testing. And so we worked with the users to give them LED products that changed colors And they could adjust over their bench and and aim it as they want.
Which really leads us to the end of the presentation which is really just the importance of laboratory lighting. Design is all about collaboration. You know, as designers, we need to start our conversations with how do you want your space to function? What types of tasks are being performed? And not just ask, What do you want? Because a lot of times, the researchers don't know all the products that are out on the market or what all the possibilities are for their space. So it's really important to have that conversation and understand how it functions and how they want it to function. And with that, I'm going to open it up for questions.
Okay, great. Thanks very much for that wonderful presentation. At this point, we are going to move into the question and answer session with the audience. Again, for those of you who may have joined us late, you can send in your questions by typing them into the q&a box on the right hand side of your screen. Even if you don't have a question, we invite you to leave a comment, let us know how you enjoyed this presentation.
Also, if you leave a question or comment, we will have a record of your name and email address. So if you'd like Karen and hcrt, to get back to you after this webinar, for any further information, or anything like that, just leave a comment. And once again, I would like to thank our sponsor Poly Science. For six years, poly science has been delivering award winning temperature control solutions for your application, find out how they can help you a poly science.com. And please see the handout section on the right hand side of your screen for more information about Poly Science. So Karen, thanks again, for a great presentation. Let's move on to the first question here. Why are there so many different types of LED products?
So what happened was that there was such a push to get any more energy efficient sources on the market. They were marketed directly, like, you know, articles came out in the New York Times touting the the, you know, the all of the great qualifications of LED lighting and how it can help the environment, you know, and there was the standards, the products were pushed out onto the market before standards were developed. And so without having standards, everyone was developing their own product to not rush to market, right to be the first to market to be the first to get the product out there. And then there became so many products on the market that it became very, very difficult to standardize. There's there's a lot of efforts, trying to standardize, but once products were on the market, it was hard to hard to back away.
Okay, great. Thanks. I have a few more questions here. This one says, are researchers expected to provide their requirements for all the metrics you talked about to architects?
No. I mean, I'm glad that everyone you know, is turning into this to know what they are, you know, what might be asked if you can, great, but are you expected to know every aspect of the lighting designers job? No. But you should understand what they need to know from you. Right? What is what are your what's important to you and how you do do your work? Okay, great. Thank
you. Here's some more questions coming in. This one here says how do you know if you have a lighting professional on your design team?
Well, that's a good question. Because there are a lot of different people that claim, you know, that say, Oh, I'll do the lighting. And they aren't always leading professionals. You know, sometimes they're generalists need like an architect who has a lot of other things that they're worrying about. For them to stay current on all of these technologies that we talked about, is a little daunting. Some architects are very good at it, and others aren't.
But the one thing that you can do as a client to make sure that you have a lighting professional is look at the resumes of your design team is Is there anyone on your design team who's lighting certified, there's a lighting certification exam that's conducted by the NCQA LP and it requires continuing education credits, you know, it's it's professional exam that you have to take and pass and submit continuing education credits for just like a PE or an AIA license or any of the other design professional licenses.
So I encourage people to look for that LLC. There's also an L ClD certified lighting design, which is given out by the International Association of lighting designers, and that is a portfolio that you have to submit. So that is actually looking at not just a science. So the LCS definitely looks at the science, not so much the art. The LCD looks at both the art and the science. Also and if you're a professional member of the ILD, which means you can have those initials ILD after your name. They review your portfolio so they're looking at the art and making sure you understand the art of writing. So those are 10 Three letters after after someone's name thing that you can look for when you're reviewing resumes.
So the next question says, What was the discussion around not for use in emergency situations as was presented on the LED replacement lamp slide?
Yeah, great question. And I was shocked when I first saw the LED lamp box. And I took it out of the box. And I said, Hey, and I even asked the rep, what does this mean, you know, not for use in emergency systems. And they weren't sure either. And they asked the factory, what we came up with, and no one really knows for sure why it was put there. But we believe it's put there and it's still present on some boxes today. Because of that lamp depreciates over time and doesn't fail. They're worried that if the lamps not changed, and it's still functioning, it may not produce enough light to meet emergency egress code, right? Like, it's the old problem for the anyone who was around long enough to use mercury vapor lamps, where the lamps looked like they were operating, they just weren't producing a lot of light. And so if maintenance doesn't change them, you may not have the required emergency egress levels.
Okay, great. Thanks. We have another question here that says, I'm a technical manager at university, we're getting a new building, I want to ensure that our lighting is well designed and meets our needs. So can you talk a little bit about that maybe what questions everyone needs to ask or what they need to be aware of in this situation?
Sure. And so part of that is like, right, like I talked about, how do you know that there's a professional lighting? Designer on your team? Look at the resumes of your team members? Do they have an LC a ClD? Or are they IALC professional members? In the States, those are the are the three guidelines to look for the three certifications to look for. Internationally, there's also the s. S. S S L, over in London, another organization, by the way. So definitely, you know, talk to your teammates find out is there anyone who's dedicated to lighting design on the team? And just, you know, start having these conversations, right, you've taken the seminar. So now, you know, what kind of questions to ask, well, how are you going to, you know, talk about, are you looking at color fidelity, if they don't even know what color fidelity is? Right? That metrics only been around a couple of years. So they really aren't keeping up with the current status of things.
Okay, great. Thanks very much, Karen. Take a look at the next question. Sorry, I'm, again, having technical issues with the storm here. Are you able to read off the next question for me, Karen, please?
Yep. So it's Yes. Yep. Our clients starting to ask you to declare products in your lab spaces. I have not had any requirements to declare lighting products. I'm not sure specifically, what's being asked if you want to? I'm not sure what you mean by declare products? So sorry, I don't completely understand that question. But if you want to follow up, I can get back to you. As far as do we always provide product data? Yes, as part of the Oh nm manual, all of the product data should be given to the owner because they need to maintain that. And again, it's not like fluorescent lamps where you could just go out to Home Depot and buy new lamps, and really amp your fixture, you need to go back to the manufacturer and get the LED modules that were designed for that particular fixture. So it's really important to have that data.
Okay, great. Thanks. So I'm going to invite that, that comments or to maybe follow up with that was a brand name or something like that, but maybe they would like to just kind of follow up in another comment. So So do you want to read off the next question Can for me, please.
Sure. Does an LED that can change colors actually have more elements? Or is it just a tuning process? So there are more LED modules. So an LED product that changes colors, typically has an you'll see an RGB RGB W RGB a like and so what that stands for is red, green, blue, W white, it might just be red, green, blue. It could be red, green, blue, Amber, RGB, or RGBA. So all of those acronyms stand for color. And so in the color changing LED, there are multiple modules that are all different colors and it's just through the dimming controls. That one comes on one comes off the Red and Blue might mix to get purple, you know, so it's color additive and color changing to get all the different colors.
Okay, great. Thanks. It looks like we have maybe one more question here. Measuring lux levels for occupational hygiene compliance purposes is a challenge, what type of looks instrument if any, will you recommend to measure led sources?
Sure, so we we typically measure, we use a Minolta illuminator illumination meter, you want to make sure that it is corrected, it typically has like a little white dome on it. There are light meters on the market that, and the best way I can describe it is that they aren't square wave corrected. So they don't really see what your eye sees, right. And so we have a Minolta Reed and there's a lot of different types of light meters on the market. But you want to make sure that you have one, if you're looking at it, you had you can tell is that there will be a little white dome on it so that it's getting light from multiple angles, just like your light your eye does. Right?
When you're when you're looking at space space, you're looking straight ahead, but you're also getting contributions from the sides and you want your light level reading to take get that same contribution. There are light meters on the on the market that just have a flat lens to them. And what that's doing that will give you a light level reading, but it will be much lower than the other type of meter. And the reason is, if you think of putting a funnel up to your eye and looking through, you are only looking directly ahead and you're getting none of the contribution from the sides. And so you will have a hard time meeting illumination recommendations if you're using that type of a meter. I hope that helped.
Okay, wonderful. Thanks so much. So that does bring us to the end of this webinar. And again, I'd like to remind you all this webinar will be available for free on demand viewing shortly following the slide presentation. So please watch your email for a message from lab manager once this video is available. On behalf of lab manager. I'd like to thank Karen Murphy for all the hard work she put into this presentation. And I would like to thank all of you for taking time out of your busy schedules to join us today. I would again like to thank our sponsor Poly Science whose support allows lead manager to offer these webinars free of charge for our readers, find out how they can help you at Poly science.com. For more information on all of our upcoming or on demand webinars, or to learn more about the latest tools and technologies for the laboratory, please visit our website at lab manager.com. We hope you can join us again thank you very much and have a great day.