How can I verify car park lighting unrealistic £10k cost

[Adam_151]

My good reason was the cost of the 8 foot tubes!

And actually being able to get them, used to look after some properties for a care organisation, Friday afternoon got a cool for a kitchen light not working, asked on the phone, is it a tube style one, and can you estitmate length, Yes and 5 foot, possibly 6 was the answer. Went out there with 5' T8 tubes, 6' T8 tubes and also 49w T5s, eventually found the place, walked in, looked at light 8' T12.... now where do you get8' tubes at half past five on the last friday before christmas?! Found a toolstation about half hour drive away, went and picked up the highest output LED batten fitting they had on the shelves, although its stated lumen output seemed to be less than that of a 8' tube according to google, returned to site, fitted it, told them sorry if its not bright enough but its all I can do at the given moment only to be told that its actually brighter than the one it replaced.

It seems that merely comparing lumen values on paper doesn't seem to always reflect reality for some reason, and although I've always been pleasently supprised by the brightness acheived, I'm sure there will come a time when it goes the other way :S

I have also seen the result where someone has tried to light an industrial boiler house using LED floodlights, that ended up where more and more fittings kept getting thrown up, but it was still very gloomy in there and shadows all over the place

 

[JohnW2]

LED replacements use less electricity and give less light. You will need almost double the number. ”

Whilst that is true if one looks at the 'watts' and 'lumens' figures, as i have often reported, I have, over the years, replaced many fluorescent tubes with LED ones of the same length (hence roughly half the power and half the theoretical light output of the fluorescent one) and, at least so far, have always found the amount of illumination provided by the LED one to be quite adequate. I think there may be two possibly explanatory factors ...

1... I think fluorescent tunes were often unnecessarily over-powered. People tended to chose them on the basis of length in relation to the 'length' of the room/whatever being illuminated, and there was never any significant choice of different powers for a fluorescent of a particular length.

2... The light from LED tubes is much more directional than that from fluorescent ones, such that looking just at the 'lumens' figures can, in some situations, be misleading. If, for example, one wants primarily to illuminate a workbench or work surface from above, then an LED tube may well do that more effectively than a fluorescent one with the same ('total') limen output.

Whatever, in practical terms one has to remember that, from this month onwards, fluorescent tubes are going to become increasingly difficult to obtain, so the situation is likely to gradually become 'forced'.

Kind Regards, John

 

[JohnW2]

1. Maybe. But I tried changing a 4’ florescent in my utility room for a LED tube and the first thing the misses said was, “Why do dim?” The florescent went back.

Fair enough. Experience will obviously vary, and I can only report my own, which have been as I described. However, as I implied [per (2) above and below] it's when one primarily wants to illuminate a surface below the tube that the LED one probably 'does better than one might expect from its lumen output', and that may not be the case in a utility room.

2. You used to be able to get florescent tubes with a built in reflector which improved light in one direction. Not seen them for a while though.

Same here. However, even they probably sent out a lot more light 'sideways' than does an LED tube, which would be to some extent 'wasted' if it was a surface below one most wanted to illuminate.

Kind Regards, John

 

[johnny2007]

Op, send the landlord a section 22 notice and they will have to disclose all accounts related to your service charge within a month, including the electricity bill for the garage.
Surely something is wrong there and from personal experience the "mistake" is from the landlord/management company.
They're all a bunch of crooks.