Blog from SCL Direct | Leading UK Supplier of Floodlights and Emergency Lighting

The brightness of a lamp is measured in lumens, a unit of measure for light energy. The total light output from a lamp is expressed in lumens. The higher the lumens output, the brighter the light. All lamps used in SCL Direct floodlights are listed below with the lumens output stated.

As a point of reference a 500 Watt Tungsten Halogen lamp has a lumens output of 10,000

If you would like free help and advice on which lamp to choose for your Metal Halide Floodlight or Sodium Floodlights contact SCL Direct at info@scldirect.co.uk, SCL Direct are one of the UK’s leading online suppliers of high quality Floodlights and Lighting Products

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Here at SCL Direct we are always looking for ways to provide better products at no extra cost to the customer. A way we have managed to do this recently is to provide a quality Venture branded 28,000 hour expected life lamp with all our ever popular 70 watt SON floodlights and wallpacks. Whilst a lot of other online lighting stores supply cheap unbranded 10,000 or at the most 12,000 hour life lamps with their products. We thought we would give the customer more, nearly three times much more in some cases.

This lamp still has the same light output as other SON lamps, 5,300 lumens which is the equivalent to a over a 300 watt tungsten halogen lamp. Sodium lighting often referred to as SON or HPS (high pressure sodium) is one of the most economical ways of all night lighting for running and maintenance costs. The 70 watt SON lamp now supplied with all SCL Direct floodlights and wallpacks has a 83 lumens per watt output, this exceeds the requirements of the Building regulations Part L1 which states 40 lumens per watt is energy efficient by over double the guidelines.

SCL Direct – A little extra goes a long way
Contact SCL Direct for all the latest offers on Floodlights, Security Lighting and Emergency Lighting.

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In an emergency when the lighting goes down, getting it back up can mean the difference between a safe escape or an unfortunate accident; making emergency lighting, not only the best option, but a legal requirement which carries serious consequences if not fulfilled.

In a blackout emergency lighting can illuminate the way towards fire exits. It can reduce panic among frightened staff and help to evacuate staff out of a building safely. Without it everyday obstacles can become highly dangerous and can become lethal.

Emergency lighting comes in a range of products that varies from internal/external bulkheads to exit signs to twin spots and many more. Knowing which emergency lighting to use for each situation is key and should be checked with via a fire safety expert, the contractor during installation to ensure it meets the required legislation.

Most emergency lighting comes in two options – maintained and non-maintained:

Maintained:

A maintained fitting can be either wired to be permanently on or switched like a normal light via a light switch or other suitable controller and then operate in the event of power failure.

Non-Maintained:

A non maintained fitting does not switch on until power is lost to the unit.

Once the power cut occurs the lights can remain on for an average of one to three hours allowing everyone to make a safe escape from the problem area.

But having emergency lighting in place is not enough, it should be regularly tested to ensure it works correctly; some emergency lighting contain rechargeable batteries and other components that may break over extended periods of time…it’s always better be safe than sorry especially when people rely on having a clearly lit escape route!

Emergency lighting is not just for helping people to escape but it also can be used to illuminate emergency equipment for staff or response personnel, such as fire extinguishers/floodlights which in turn can help to save lives.

When properly used emergency lighting has been proven to help and should be treated with the same regard as other emergency equipment.

Legislation for emergency lighting is constantly being amended to help protect people working in factories and offices that could potentially be at risk when power goes out and it is the responsibility of the designated individual and the owners of the premises to adhere.

Emergency lighting is used in conjunction with other safety equipment such as photo-luminescent tape, LED guide lights, illuminated exit signs to assist the evacuation of an office or factory.

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As one of the leading online stores for industrial and commercial lighting SCL Direct offer a free live help chat service. If, whilst browsing our large range of floodlights, you would like to know if you need a 150 watt Metal Halide or 400 watt sodium floodlight to light up your car park simply click on live help and ask. We are online every week day and sometimes in the evening and weekends.

Live help is usually monitored by our Product Manager, Matt Priest. He has nearly 20 years of electrical wholesale and lighting trade experience. If he cannot answer your question immediately he will call or email you back within 24 hours. His current immediate answer rate is 95%, so room for improvement!

Live chat cannot just be used for technical questions, please use this instant reply service for anything from stock enquires to order progressing. If we are not online when you want to ask us a question, simply leave a message and we will respond within 24 hours.

A little extra customer service goes along way….

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If you are on the lookout for some great bargains on lighting products check out SCL Direct Clearance Lighting Corner.

Here are some of the bargains to be found in the Clearance Corner this week, here are a list of some of the products available at discounted prices with the links to the products.

Clearance Decorative Lighting
Clearance decorative lighting for bathroom,lounge and dining room at less than trade and wholesale price.
Chrome Triple Head IP44 Bathroom Light Only £17
Illuminated Bathroom/Bedroom Mirror – Only £40

Clearance Reccessed Downlights
Recessed downlights including GU10 mains and MR16 low voltage priced to sell.
240v 35w GU10 IP65 Downlight (3 Pack) – Only £15

Clearance Garden and External Lighting
All our garden and external lighting is limited stock on a first come,first served basis. Many items are ex display or from a discontinued line.
Buy LED Decking Light Kit – Set of 5 – Only £22

To see the full range of clearance lighting visit the Clearance Corner.

SCL Direct have a full range of Floodlights, Emergency Lighting, Security and Home and Garden Lighting, visit http://www.scldirect.co.uk to see the full range.

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With the increase in sales on our Metal Halide Floodlights range we have now created a category specially for this range of Floodlighting.

You can find the new category here: http://www.scldirect.co.uk/metal-halide-floodlights.html

Over the coming weeks SCL Direct will be bringing you a range of product reviews and updates to our blog, keep checking back.

In the mean time if you have any questions or lighting requirements SCL Direct can help with Floodlighting, Emergency Lighting, Security lighting and much more, you could also visit our Home and Garden Lighting website at www.onlights.co.uk

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The most commonly found domestic floodlight is the standard 500 Watt PIR tungsten halogen floodlight. This floodlight, whilst being bright, is far from perfect for normal domestic use. When using a 500 Watt lamp this fitting is costly in consumption cost and lamp cost. This is because the lamp gets too hot in most enclosed fittings and shortens the lamp life; most halogen lamps have an expected lamp life of between 1500-2000 hours but in reality this can be reduced to as little as just 500 hours. Furthermore, running costs for this floodlight are high at around 7.5 pence an hour. Considering most halogen lamps only produce around 18 lumens per Watt this falls well below the 40 lumens per Watt required for energy efficient lighting standards.

Low Energy Floodlighting

Over the last few years, due to spiralling energy costs and more concern for environmental issues, a demand for low energy floodlights with a long life lamp has emerged. A number of solutions meet this requirement, with the best suited to domestic use being compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) models. Whilst not being as bright as the 500 Watt tungsten halogen lamp versions these are far more suited to domestic use.

CFL Lighting

One of the easiest ways to change to CFL lighting is a retro fit lamp for standard 118mm tungsten halogen lamps. This lamp is a 24 Watt model about the equivalent of 120-150 Watt halogen lamp which is adequate to light up a patio area for general illumination. The running costs for this lamp is 95% lower compared to a 500w halogen lamp, in some cases as low as 0.005p per hour. Furthermore it produces an environmentally friendly 52 lumens per Watt. Another popular CFL floodlights is a 2 x 26W PLC version which has a light output comparable to 300 Watts of halogen.

The Advantages

The main advantages of CFLs are the lower running costs and an extended lamp life which can be anything from 8,000 hours to 20,000 hours depending on lamp and ballast combination. Another advantage is the range of lamp colours. These include soft warm white (2700K) which is ideal for summer evening barbecues, standard white (3500K) which is suited to general illumination, and cool white (4000K) or daylight (6400K), which are best suited for use with CCTV security equipment (more about this can be found in the commercial industrial section).

LED Floodlighting

A recent development in floodlighting is LED technology. These floodlights are now appearing on the domestic market, and while they have a higher initial cost this is offset by running costs and lamp life. For example, a floodlight with a 160 LED cluster only uses approximately 8.5 Watts of power to produce the equivalent light of an 80 Watt incandescent lamp, and will have an expected lamp life of approximately 50,000 hours, making this extremely economical to run. LED lighting is certainly the one to watch in for the future as it is improving rapidly.

If you would like to know more about security floodlights please contact us to find out more.

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Welcome to the SCL Direct blog, your source for all the news that’s new and approved for your perusal by the SCL Directors. Over the coming weeks, months and years we will use this little corner of the internet to keep you updated on what’s going on behind the scenes, new product ranges and other interesting snippets of information relating to the lighting industry.

Who are SCL Direct? Well, we’re an online retailer specialising in lighting products. Because we buy direct from the manufacturers this means we’re able to provide top quality products at fantastic prices by cutting out the middle man. This also means we find out about new products and new technologies literally as soon as they’ve been developed so we’re perfectly situated to keep you updated with any changes you may need to be aware of.

As well as selling lights we’re also able to prepare lighting schemes for a variety of purposes, from sports areas (such as football pitches or equestrian arenas) to industrial workshops and commercial workspaces. If you’re needing some advice on how to illuminate your environment feel free to get in touch with our house-trained lighting experts. They don’t bite (much) and will always give you the highest quality advice they can.

Whatever your lighting needs we’re sure SCL Direct can deliver, so whether you’re wanting advice on emergency lighting or a scheme for your office please contact us directly by e-mail or telephone and we’ll do what we can to help.

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After nearly 11 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 in just 42 days, we’re releasing WordPress 3.0.1. The requisite haiku:

Three dot oh dot one
Bug fixes to make you smile
Update your WordPress

This maintenance release addresses about 50 minor issues. The testing many of you contributed prior to the release of 3.0 helped make it one of the best and most stable releases we’ve had.

Download 3.0.1 or update automatically from the Dashboard > Updates menu in your site’s admin area.

Note: If you downloaded 3.0.1 in the first 20 minutes of release (before 2200 UTC), you’ll want to reinstall it, which you can do right from your Updates screen. Our bad.

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Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.

In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.

WordPress users will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 if their hosting environment does not meet these requirements (the built-in updater will prevent it). In order to determine which versions your host provides, we’ve created the Health Check plugin. You can download it manually, or use this handy plugin installation tool I whipped up. Right now, Health Check will only tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. In a future release it will provide all sorts of useful information about your server and your WordPress install, so hang on to it!

In summary: WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, will require PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. Install the Health Check plugin to see if you’re ready!

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