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Description
A New Breed of Ballasts
By John Dyslin, editor
High-efficiency ballast and lamp systems are poised to change the lighting market.
Lighting represents a huge cost for most commercial and industrial settings. After heating and air conditioning, lighting is often the next biggest expense. Hence, businesses are searching for ways to cut lighting costs and to make lighting more energe efficient.
Today, there is a variety of lighting options that businesses can choose from. Everything from compact fluorescent to LED to halogen to newer forms of incandescent lighting technologies can positively impact lighting costs. These new technologies do not neglect lamp life, lumen maintenance or the color rendering index, the three characteristics most users are concerned about in lighting today, according to Jeff Plaskon, ballast product manager, GE Consumer & Industrial. There are many lights today that deliver the same light output while using less wattage.
In addition to lighting, the ballast is another component to energy efficiency savings. New high-efficiency electronic ballasts are replacing the standard electronic ballast. Plaskon says nearly 20 percent of electronic ballasts installed for T8 lamps are high efficiency with an even higher percentage of ballasts sold for fluorescent retrofits.
In the past decade, electronic ballasts have become more sophisticated and cost less. Plaskon notes that in the 1990s, T8 fluorescent lamps became... |
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