imag - green living

Customer

Singapore has positioned itself as a global education hub in Asia. It has attracted many well-known institutions to have a base here, such as Insead and Chicago Business School.

An international school in the Orchard Road area approached Huge Inventions to help it go green. It wanted to avoid using fluorescent tubes as they contained mercury, which is toxic.

The international school has many classrooms. Each classroom typically is about 7.2 m long and 6.2 m wide with a ceiling height of 2.7 m. It has 9 pairs of 4-feet T8 fluorescent tubes, evenly spaced.

The international school replaced the fluorescent tubes with imag 4-feet T8 LED tubes. Each LED tube uses 17W and has an efficacy of about 80 lumens per watt. The brightness in the classroom as measured by the school was about the same as before. Other than being more efficient, the LED tubes are non-toxic (does not contain mercury), low heat and long lasting.

The 4-feet T8 fluorescent tube is 36W. It works with magnetic ballast, which consumes about 6W. The existing lighting thus consumes a total of 42W per tube. The 4-feet T8 LED tube only uses 17W. That works out to be a savings of 25W(or 25/42 = 60%).

The lights in the classrooms are turned-on for 8 hours each day. Each LED tube helps save 25W x 8hours = 200Wh or 0.2kWh each day. Taking the electricity tariff as SGD0.25 per kwh, the electricity savings work out to be SGD0.05 per day. In a year, the electricity cost savings for a classroom is 18 tubes x 300 days x SGD0.05 = SGD270.00.

The aim of the international school to go green and avoid fluorescent tubes, which contain toxic mercury, is achieved by using LED tubes. The cost savings makes the decision to go green much easier.