JSA 3i Retail Lighting

Retail lighting design
Good lighting can help to attract customers and sell merchandise.

Regardless of the store size, retail lighting needs to:

1. Attract consumers to examine the merchandise
2. Guide them through the store
3. Help complete the sale

In this issue we share with you some of the latest trends in retail lighting design.
We investigate in straightforward terms what type of lighting a department store requires.
We look at the systems available and touch on techniques and technological advancement.
Lighting design is complex, and those who are not trained in it can very easily use it incorrectly.

Techniques and technology
Lighting Hardware:

Lamp
The light source – where the light comes from.

Luminaire
The posh name for a light fitting, or fixture.

Downlighter
A luminaire that directs all of its light downwards, usually within quite a narrow angle of projection.

Projector
The catch-all term for spotlights, floodlights etc.
The term used for a luminaire designed to ‘throw’ its light onto an object or plane.

Uplighter
A luminaire that distributes all or most of it’s light upwards to the ceiling.

Reflector
A material that gives back into space some or all of the light that it receives.

Diffuser
A material placed in front of a light source or reflector to soften the intensity and modify the direction of light.

	Techniques and technology Lighting Measurements:
	Lumen The unit of luminous flux. Really this is the most basic unit in light measurement, in that everything else is measured from it. It refers to the amount of light that a source gives off. Lux The unit of illuminance. This is the unit that everyone’s heard of, and refers to the amount of light that is measured at any particular spatial point. Some people think that the number of lux in a room determines how bright a room is. This is only part of the story more of this later. Its equal to one lumen per square metre (1lm/m²), so as a unit of measurement it has something to do with space as well as light emission. Candela The unit of luminous intensity. This is the unit used when we measure the light coming from a luminaire (measurements taken all around a luminaire so that we can see the light output pattern produced) and is the basis for the polar curves that you see in the luminaire technical data.

Light Sources:
There are basically only three groups of artificial light source.


	1.Filament Lamps Also known as ‘Incandescent lamps’. Based on the simple idea of passing an electric current through a wire. Tungsten: The basis light bulb, or general lighting service (GLS) lamp heads up the tungsten family. Tungsten Halogen: A fortuitous relationship between the tungsten of the filament, the halogen gas within the lamp envelope and the temperature within the envelope. The very popular low voltage lamp is a tungsten halogen lamp.

2. Discharge Lamps
A very different technology, relying upon the excitation of gases within a discharge tube. A high voltage pulse causes the gas in the tube to become a carrier of electricity. Here we are only dealing with those lamps likely to be met in interior design.

2a: The fluorescent tube:
The standard fluorescent tube has a tube diameter of 26mm
A new lamp is the T5 tube - with a diameter of 5/8ths of an inch
Another new lamp is the T2 tube – with a diameter of 2/8ths of an inch!

2b: Compact fluorescent:
All compact fluorescents have excellent colour rendering, because the manufacturers realised that it would be pretty silly to develop a brand new lamp and give it the bad habits of its forebears.
.
2c: Metal Halide:
These lamps have been available for commercial application for about twenty years and they are being continually improved
- More colour stability over their life
- Lower wattages
- Dimmable

2d: High Pressure Sodium:
All of the discharge lamps mentioned here have used mercury as the base for their light generation. This generates a fundamentally blue light, and this has long been a characteristic of the fluorescent family. The sodium lamp on the other hand, generates a fundamentally yellow light so any light option will offer a “warm” light.

	3.The Rest The Rest is becoming dominated by one source, the LED lamp. LED = Light Emitting Diode. The greatest fun to be had is with the RGB colour facility. These are clusters of R red, G green, B blue LEDs within a single fixture, with separate control of each colour way. All the colours of the rainbow and beyond.

What type of lighting does a department store require?

Most stores require a mix of various types of ambient, task and accent lighting systems.
Basic store types will simply use high illumination levels to achieve these goals, whereas intermediate and high-end retailers will use colour, contrast, accent and other lighting design techniques to create an ambience that attracts the consumer to the merchandise.

We welcome your feedback. Email us with any comments, suggestions or requests - if you know someone who you think would like to be included on our emailing list then please forward their email address to us.

13 Devon Square Newton Abbot Devon TQ12 2HN

tel: 01626 336083 fax: 01626 336103 email: enquiries@jamieson-smith.co.uk
www.jamieson-smith.co.uk

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