A group of councils in North East England are designing a project to work with schools in order to reduce electricity consumption. The initial idea is to work with school caretakers (janitors) to help them design and then implement a shut down procedure at the start of the long summer holiday (mid-July to early September in the UK. The aim would be to reduce electricity use in the school to a minimum over this period. The hope is that, once established, similar shut down routines would become the norm for all holiday and weekend closure. We are at the research phase at the moment and are trying to find out if similar projects have taken place before and whether any reports exist as to their success.
Chris Francis
Environmental Protection Officer
Middlesbrough Council
United Kingdom
Energy Management in Schools
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The development of LED has been restricted to a very monochrome (white only) type of luminiscence. Are there newer bulbs that emit the full spectrum of normal white (daylite) light?
Donald Costin
President
AC Innovations
Canada
Googling "daylight LEDs" gets you many links to choose from.
Ron Harben
Air Quality Coordinator
California Association of Resource Conservation Districts
United States
The short answer to the question of LED "daylight" is Yes they exist, however as with any 'short answer' there comes a BUT. Our research has led to the decision to tread cautiously on this subject as the life-of-use quality is questionable. There is little doubt that they will "shortly" be a viable commercial solution but at present there are some short comings we could not look past.
Give them another 6-12 months, given the rate of improvement in technology, & we believe there will be some excellent options in the market place. In our case, to put this in perspective, we were/are looking at replacing large commercial lighting and incorporating it all in a sustainable engery solution of captured energy & water production.
Stewart Hubber
Consultant
Australia
As sustainability consultants working with breakthroughs that change the way we "see" building technology systems, we have been working with the Syracuse City School District to investigate advancements that automate some of what you are seeking.
One such advancements is the idea of upgrading the lighting in a school to LED, where the LED driver is centralized in the I.T. closet and all of the lights operate on a computer network over Direct Current (not AC) networks.
In this scenario, we are seeing a 70% reduction in electricity use for lighting, and lighting quality jump to 85% of daylight quality. We are looking at the daylighting studies fro the '90s where this kind of improvement significantly increase both reading and math scores.
In this district, the summer months now have students attending summer school to make up for the challenges that occur during the regular school year, so month-to-month solutions are more the focus.
Our investigation has been ongoing for the past 10 months, and the energy savings are sound. Secondary savings include a tremendous reduction in facility maintenance (no replacing light bulbs and ballasts... no mercury intervention on the fluorescent lamps), which added to the 70% reduction in electricity, is a win-win.
Good luck with your project!
Adam Lilien
CEO
Nectar Partners
United States
www.NectarPartners.com