Valtavalo’s corporate blog is back. Enjoy the first story!
Valtavalo has created a new service to encourage businesses and the public sector to replace old fluorescent tubes with new alternatives that help to save the environment, energy and money.
High quality is Valtavalo’s key competitive asset. The lifetime of our industrial-grade G-series LED tubes is 125,000 hours, compared to “professional-grade” products, which have to be replaced every 40,000–50,000 hours.
Although 40,000 hours sounds like a long time, you mustn’t forget that an LED tube is a piece of electronic equipment and that, according to a rule of thumb within the electronics industry, for every 10-degree increase in temperature (above room temperature, which is the basis for the lifetime indicated in the brochures), the actual lifetime decreases by 50 per cent.
Inside the plastic housing of a luminaire, the temperature is always ten degrees higher than outside. Roughly, this means that the lifetime of an LED tube inside a housing is no longer 40,000 hours as promised, but 20,000 hours. Furthermore, if the lamp is fixed high up on the ceiling where the air is ten degrees above room temperature due to stratification, LED tubes hardly even have the same lifetime as luminescent tubes, as seen in the table below.
So, only by investing in industrial-grade LED tubes (with a lifetime of 125,000 hours) can you be sure that you actually will save money during the tubes’ lifetime. Valtavalo gives a seven-year warranty on its G-series LED tubes.
A service concept to complement the products
The longevity of the products even in tough conditions makes it possible to sell them in complete service packages, with modest repair and maintenance budgets. Quality is key also in the service concept that Valtavalo has created around its products in Finland.
Instead of buying the LED tubes, the customer can sign a service agreement with us. Then Valtavalo will not only provide and install the products, but also maintain and service the lighting for five years. The customer pays a monthly fee for the service, usually less than the monthly savings generated by the LED tubes.
In other words, the customer’s initial investment is zero. And the savings start immediately, thanks to the decrease in electricity consumption.
An increasing number of businesses and public sector bodies are considering energy-saving and emissions-cutting LED alternatives. Still, many of them opt for less environmentally friendly solutions.
In public procurement, for example, the selected solution is very often the one with the lowest acquisition cost, when the comparisons should be made between the total costs over the products’ lifecycle. Replacing conventional tubes with LED tubes as a service is a completely risk-free alternative: no investment is needed, the savings cover the service fee, and often there will even be some money left over.
Constant product development
The same regularities apply to the cleantech market as to any other industry. Small companies are seldom capable to compete on price only; they have to differentiate themselves from their competitors in other ways. Their product or service has to have qualities that outshine the competition. For instance, Valtavalo was the first to introduce G4 LED tubes, which have virtually no flickering. The number 4 in the name reveals that it is a fourth-generation LED tube. Where the earlier product generations were all about trying to emulate the lighting created by traditional fluorescent tubes, the fourth generation is a step towards enhancing the user experience. Its focus is on human-centric lighting.
Research on the effects of flickering lights on well-being and health shows that flickering may cause, for example, restlessness, headaches and fatigue.
Flickering makes it more difficult to focus on work and causes discomfort. It also affects eye movements: according to studies, reading in flickering light slows down the reading and work speed.
Therefore, replacing conventional tubes with long-lasting G4 LED tubes can be a profitable investment in more ways than one. An investment that you can make without actually investing – as a service.
