THE SWITCH

 

Upgrading the lights in the dining halls have some great benefits!

 

Safety

Lighting can also be used for safety measures, and are especially useful in college campuses. Often security lighting focuses on the outdoors, but in buildings that are vacant for long periods of time, a certain amount of lighting is needed for security. Boyce (1992, p.14) states that campus security have a “belief that good lighting acts as a deterrent for crime” but he says it hasn’t been proven. But there are advantages in better lighting, he explains that four key points contribute: illuminance, uniformity, glare and light color. Illuminance helps with facial recognition and allows security personnel to patrol from a greater distance. Uniformity means there are no blind-spots in the area under vigilance, even though it is often seen as wasteful from the general population. Glare can affect the sight of any security measures and light source color helps with identification of any danger and color recognition. Right now the dining halls use halogen and incandescent lights which are not very efficient so it is actually quite costly to keep the lights on at all hours. Substituting the lights with either CFLs or LEDs would not only improve campus safety but also the budget.

 

Boyce, Peter R. "Lighting: The Missing Piece in the Campus Security Jigsaw." Lighting Management and Maintenance, August 1992, pp. 14-15.

 

 

Heating

Incandescent and Halogen light bulbs have the added heating aspect.  Without any further research one might think that this would help with heating costs of a building, but the truth is that although incandescent and halogen bulbs lose almost all of their energy in heat, they are generally up high and therefore have no actual effect in the people in the area. Also, we live in Texas and relying on the heat of light bulbs for the few days a year we are cold isn’t effective. Also, any lighting that is lower to the ground will be at a much safer heat, incandescent and halogen lights can get hot to the point of burning skin.

 

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=4006