FAQ – Questions and answers
The FAQ provides initial answers to questions frequently asked in the past.
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There are technical rules for workplaces (ASR) for commercial areas. The specifications on the subject of lighting are regulated in Section A3.4.
The specifications of these workplace guidelines on lighting serve to protect the safety and health of employees at the workplace and describe the lighting required for selected activities in order to perform visual tasks in a way that is compatible with health. The influence of daylight at the workplace is taken into account to the extent necessary for the health and safety of employees.
Here you will find relevant information on luminous intensity, glare values and colour rendering for almost all areas of application.
Here you will find the current version of the ASR.
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We play fair.
A professional lighting design is the basis for needs-optimised lighting. That’s why we take lighting planning very seriously and invest between one day and two weeks of working time for evaluation and planning, depending on the scope of the lighting project. The result is a professional lighting concept that includes a detailed and ASR-compliant implementation plan. After inspecting your facility, we will provide you with a quotation for this planning service. We charge 50% of the costs if you commission us.
If you do not commission us, you will of course receive the full lighting design with the invoice.
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Ideally, you provide us with the floor plan of your property in file form (DWG, PDF or similar).
Alternatively, we will take measurements on site and create the floor plans required for planning. -
Depending on the initial situation (actual situation and type of lighting), we are currently able to reduce the energy demand to at least one third of the current energy costs.
Once the evaluation is complete, we will be happy to provide you with a comprehensive and reliable profitability analysis, that provides information on the payback period, among other things.
You can get an initial estimate of your personal savings potential here on our website with our energy cost calculator calculator.
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Both units describe the luminous flux of a light source.
- Lumen (lm) is the unit of luminous flux emitted in all directions. It characterises the brightness or the light output of a light source.
- Lux (lx) is the illuminance. It indicates the luminous flux (measured in lm) falling on a unit area, i.e. how brightly a certain area is illuminated by a lamp.
In professional lighting design, luminous intensity is always assessed on the surfaces under consideration. Accordingly, all planning and statements refer to lux values.
A simple derivation, conversion or correlation of these two values is not possible. Factors such as directional light through the choice of a beam angle (optics) have a significant influence on illuminance.
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LEDs are widely advertised with a service life of 50,000 hours. However, this statement should be considered in a more differentiated way. On the one hand, a distinction must be made between the LED chip and the LED LUMINAIRE system (consisting of chip, driver and housing) when considering service life. On the other hand, the place of use and its conditions (e.g. ambient temperatures, dust, dirt, humidity) have an influence on the service life of an LED.
When LEDs are used, the illumination tends to decrease gradually, as with any electrical device. There is a standard (DIN IEC/PAS 62 717) that determines the service life of LEDs:
- This parameter can be used to make statements about the service life and luminosity of an LED.
- Specifically, the marking indicates the decrease in luminous flux.
- The value is made up of two units: An L value and a B value.
Example: L70B10
L-value: luminous flux decrease
The L-value describes the value of the luminous flux reduction in percent.
L70 describes a luminous flux decrease of up to 30 percent from the initial value of the LED module.
B-value: number of affected LEDs
The B-value describes the number of affected LED modules in the luminous flux decrease. B10 means that 10 percent of the modules will fall below the defined L value (or fail completely).
The information on the useful life and failure rate of our products can be found on the corresponding product data sheets.
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The essential parts of an LED are the following three components:
- LED Chips
- Driver
- Housing
All greenius® LEDs contain high-quality components that are perfectly matched to each other.
The visible light and its quality are determined by the LED chips. Even if these chips look almost identical – they are not. All parameters such as efficiency, colour rendering value and durability are found in the chips.
To operate LEDs, a driver that matches the power of the LEDs is needed. The driver converts the alternating current (AC) side of our power grid into direct current (DC) and supplies the LEDs with power. The driver also contains electrical components that are subject to wear (e.g. capacitors). For long-term durability, the driver must be designed accordingly.
Info: The driver also determines the dimming and control characteristics of LED luminaires. In addition to constant current drivers, we also offer dimmable TRIAC (phase-angle control), 1-10 V or DALI drivers for integration into intelligent lighting control concepts.
LEDs do not like heat. The heat generated by operation must be dissipated quickly and reliably from the LED board occupied by the LED chips. The housing of the LED luminaire takes over this important task of heat dissipation (thermal design).
For optimal thermal management, materials with fast heat dissipation such as aluminium and copper are used.
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The colour rendering index (CRI) provides information on the quality of colour rendering or colour fidelity and is expressed in XX Ra. The higher the value, the more colour-true the light is. The reference is natural sunlight at 100 % (100 Ra).
CRI > 80 Ra (good colour rendering)
CRI > 90 Ra (very good colour rendering)
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Correlated Colour Temperature (CCT) provides information about the colour temperature of light and is given in Kelvin (K). The lower the value in Kelvin, the warmer the light appears because the red component is higher. The spectrum of white light from LEDs can be divided into four categories:
Warm white light (< 3,300 K) is a cosy, atmospheric light and is well suited to illuminating living and sleeping areas.
Neutral white light (3,300 – 4,500 K) has an encouraging effect, increases contrasts and is therefore ideal for workplace lighting.
Daylight white light (4,500 – 6,500 K) is the ideal light source wherever daylight character is required even with artificial light and colours need to be reproduced as naturally as possible.
Cold white light (sky white) (> 6,500 K) appears very sober because it contains a high proportion of blue. It corresponds even more “strongly” to daylight moods and is suitable when high visual requirements are demanded.
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The glare value of a luminaire is expressed in UGR (Unified Glare Rating). The lower the UGR value, the lower the psychological glare.
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We have unconditional demands on the quality of our products and have defined strict requirements for safety, functionality, material and workmanship of our products. In order to be able to guarantee compliance with our strict quality requirements, all manufacturing partners must be able to present and prove current certifications for the quality management standard (QM system EN ISO 9001).
Our certified products have the relevant certificates CE/EMC (2014/30/EC), CE/LVD (2014/35/EC) and RoHS (2011/65/EC). In addition, we check our products in our own tests and commission independent test institutes to carry out the checks. In addition to physical product quality, our quality standards also cover the conditions under which the articles are manufactured. For example, our manufacturing partners must submit a code of conduct to assume social responsibility towards their employees.
But we don’t just rely on written certificates: we regularly visit existing and potential manufacturing partners to check our quality specifications on site. Our Hong Kong office supports us in daily communication and on-site quality inspections.
Every production run at our partners is accompanied by our team and checked according to our specifications. To define our quality standards, we use a military standard called MIL-STD105E Level II/III, which defines the so-called AQL (Accepted Quality Limited), i.e. the acceptable quality limit, as well as the corresponding testing procedure.
These measures help us to offer our customers reliable and consistent quality, confirm our success and form an important pillar of the company.