well it's not just the ceiling we've brought down hopefully today we're
going to bring your electricity bill down as we look at dimming LEDs to save energy
so lighting represents one of the biggest electrical loads in residential and commercial
buildings and to go with that we've chosen to look at down lights when it comes to dimming
because they are one of the most popular light fittings that you see installed now when it
comes to dimming you want to make sure that the performance is there as well so we've chosen these
Robus Ultimum downlights because of the breadth of the range but also the great dimming performance
the lights are only one part of the equation the other being the dimmer this dimmer here has got
a feature that we haven't shown on the channel before so make sure you stay around for that
so you're all set up to prove to me that dimming LEDs will save me money yeah and it's an easy
question to answer we've got our four uh Robus downlight in our mimic ceiling here
we're right up against and on that connected to uh this Hameg power meter you'll see we've got about
21 watts of power and then if i start to dial that down with the Robus grid dimmer we'll see that as
soon as i start dialling that down the power falls you may not have picked it up yourself because you
don't tend to notice the loss of light at the high end it's only when you get into the lower
end dimming that you're really the eye starts to see it and you can see we can smoothly dim
to off but i've set that low end so you can see with the lights nearly off we're using a watt
of power and uh yeah we can we can still see on the bench here there's still it's showing there
yeah 18 LUX turn it back up just so the audience can see us and throw a question out there how do
you work out how many downlights you need to light a typical space i'll answer it so on social media
i see rose and rose and even in my own property that gridiron approach which floods the area with
light yeah and a lot of people people like to get an even illumination which when it comes to
downloads can mean actually over lighting the space and of course lighting's very subjective
it's that your personal preference i remember growing up the big light was never switched on it
was always the table then it wasn't a thing in my day but in your day it probably was wasn't it well
in your day obviously older people need more light as well so again very subjective and we try and
fit a one-size-fits-all depend on the property but that gives us potential to save energy now to put
that in the context of our Metrel light media that we've seen in a recent video as well connected to
the MFT then you can see it's measuring a thousand LUX now for some reference there
that's what you typically have on a workbench where you're having close-up inspection work
it's double the light level that a consulting engineer would design to
in a typical office and can be ten times the level of a typical living room so we
can dim down easily and you'll see obviously we dim down we expect the light level to fall
but also a significant difference in the power level as well so let's drop down to that 100 LUX
obviously our power has gone down from yeah 21 watts to just under 3 watts of power
this Ultimum range of LED lights that we've installed here have got your electricians
covered they're easy to install and connect and across the range they come in different wattages
the ability to be colour selectable tiltable IP65 for bathrooms and all of them are dimmable
so this is the scenario okay the energy bills dropped through the letterbox i've opened it up
and for two weeks i've gone around and dim down all my LED light fittings a couple of weeks have
passed the kids don't care the conversations we had we're back to full brightness yeah well
they don't care because you're paying that bill but there's a great feature built into the grid
dimmer to help you out there Gary so what you can actually do on this is trim the high end output
okay so i'm used to trimming the low end only when we're dimming down to and stopping at a certain
point you're telling me do the same in the upper end yeah so the the little potentiometer in there
you've got the low end on your right that sets that smooth dimming that we want and we demoed
that earlier on but you can also reduce the power output down to about 60% percent of its full power
so automatically on 40% saving on full brightness yeah all right and you still get the great dimming
performance but you've just limited the power output now that has two other great effects as
well obviously when you're running LEDs at a lower power you do improve the long-term reliability
you'll also improve the lumen maintenance over time so obviously lumen maintenance was in tens
of thousands of hours it stretches out there the lower power the run obviously the less light you
lose over time as well so there's no loser there i'm saving energy and making my light fittings
last a considerably longer time as well yeah let's also not forget the biggest energy saving
comes from moving from halogen and there's still lots of them around there to LED massive energy
saving by doing that of course the most energy efficient light is one that isn't on if you're
lighting areas like this however you want to check out the Robus Golf range with the video over there