LED lighting provides numerous benefits for home and business owners. They are durable, flexible, and energy-efficient, providing an improved overall lighting experience for any environment.
Schools see significant improvements when upgrading their lighting scheme to LEDs. Most classrooms traditionally use fluorescent tubes, which creates potential interference issues for the learning experience.
Light flickers, ballast sounds, and exciting color temperatures may divert children's attention away from their studies.
Upgrading to LED lights eliminates the artificial ambiance while delivering similar benefits to natural sunlight. That's why looking at this technology's advantages is crucial for all school districts.
What Are the Advantages of LED Lights in Schools?
Before artificial lighting was widely available, schools used natural light. The windows were often open, allowing fresh air into the environment. A movement to install fluorescent lighting was intended to support student concentration and achievement in a lit environment without exposure to outside elements.
Here are the advantages of switching to LED lights in K-12 schools.
Improved Performance
LED lights are tunable to specific color temperatures, allowing the illumination profile of a room to mimic natural sunlight. Once it reaches the appropriate Kelvin measurement (usually 4,000K or above), a student's learning ability improves.
Imitating natural light with LEDs is also known to improve individual concentration, leading to more consistent rates of student academic performance.
The color temperatures are changeable. Younger students have greater difficulty concentrating in the morning, but older children and adults benefit from something cooler in the afternoon. This upgrade provides an ideal setting for pupils of any age by adjusting the "color" of the illumination profile.
Utility Savings
School districts that implement policies to switch from their current lighting profile to LEDs typically see decreases in overhead costs. This technology uses less energy than other lighting solutions on the market, resulting in significant savings in annual maintenance expenses.
Switching to LEDs can save some schools up to 80% on their overhead expense categories related to lighting.
Additional options, such as adding timers or movement sensors, can further enhance overhead cost savings.
Less Maintenance Work
School maintenance workers must replace all traditional bulbs when they stop functioning. Even when long-life fluorescent tubes or CFLs are used, the number of items to review each month can easily number in the thousands.
Employees can spend a significant amount of time replacing lights in difficult places, such as the ceiling of an auditorium or gymnasium.
Although LED lights stop working eventually, the lifetime rating for many products today tops 50,000 hours. That means maintenance crews can spend less time dealing with lighting, freeing them to complete other tasks.
Replacement Options
Schools can use LED lighting to replace any bulb type, from high hats to fluorescent tubes. It is possible to use them in recessed, suspended, or flush-mounted fixtures. They work well on walls, ceilings, or even floors with safety lights.
Every building, classroom, and facility within a school has nuanced lighting needs. The flexibility of LED allows school boards to mitigate infrastructure expenditures and recoup their lighting investment sooner when they choose LED over more costly alternatives.
What Light Is Good for Learning?
A student's mind must stay focused to work at its full potential. Specific colors impact a child's ability to concentrate, which means the light in a school can determine how hard and long kids can study.
Visible light falls within a wavelength range of 400 to 700 nanometers. You'll find blue and purple at the lower end, while oranges and reds are at the upper end.
Most people work better when working with white and blue colors from LED lighting. These options replicate natural daylight, helping kids feel more focused and awake. Furthermore, our body's internal clock uses environmental lighting to determine when we should be busy and engaged and when we should be more relaxed and rest.
Direct sunlight is up to 6,500K when evaluating its color temperature. That option might be too much for some K-12 school settings, but anything around 5,000K would be appropriate. When schools buy LED lights for their fixtures, these should be the first ones considered.
Warmer colors are not suitable for studying because they encourage relaxation. If you've ever read a book by the fireplace or in front of a candle, you've probably felt fatigued after a few minutes. That's because the brain naturally associates those temperatures with rest. When kids try to study under such conditions, a similar result occurs.
Children can detect higher sound frequencies than adults, which means they can experience noise from other light types in school settings. Upgrading to LEDs can remove this distraction while improving the color setting for improved concentration.
Upgrading your school to LED lighting is a worthwhile effort that will quickly pay off. The benefits are measurable and impactful for teachers and students who spend hours a day in a physical classroom environment. The same principle also applies to those that study from home. Using cooler temps to emulate daylight can help you stay focused.
