Lighting
The importance of customer servicesin the LED lighting and controls sector
Andrew Wilson, at Varilight, reflects on the increasing importance for lighting and lighting controls manufacturers to provide customers with the opportunity to access knowledgeable product support personnel in order to help them navigate through the complexities of LED lighting.
T
he advent of affordable LED lighting was a game-changer and has delivered the biggest step-change in
the lighting industry since Thomas Edison’s famous “light bulb moment” back in the 1880s. As LED lamp prices have steadily fallen, and their energy-saving credentials continued to improve, there has been significant growth in sales, both of the LED lamps themselves and associated control gear, including LED dimmer switches. With continuing evolution in design
increasing its versatility, growth in the take-up of LED lighting is set to maintain this momentum. LED lighting has already become the default choice for new installations and an increasing number of business owners and householders are upgrading to LED from legacy incandescent or halogen lighting schemes. This growth represents a golden opportunity
for wholesalers to establish themselves as the “go-to” experts for installers of LED lighting, by developing a product range that focuses on brands that offer products with wide
44 | electrical wholesaler September 2017
compatibility and that can deliver good product support and customer services.
Definitive guidance With such an enormous choice of LED lighting products, product support and customer services have become important to help specifiers and installers navigate their way through a rapidly evolving market. Manufacturers are in a position to offer definitive guidance on compatibility in a complex world of divergent technologies. For example, a particular LED light might be a stand-alone fitting with a mains voltage power supply and integrated driver, or it might require a low voltage power supply from either a constant current driver, a constant voltage driver or a regular 12 V AC or 24 V AC low voltage transformer. For some LED lamps, and for LED strip, a 12 V DC or 24 V DC converter is likely to be required. Given these complexities, it’s no surprise that compatibility continues to be one of the key challenges for installers. Add into the mix the requirement to dim some or all of the lighting
and the challenge of choosing a combination of light source, driver and dimmer switch that achieves smooth and stable control can become very difficult to overcome without specialist knowledge and experience. Many so-called “dimmable” LED lamps and
drivers prove difficult to dim in reality, unless a versatile LED dimmer is chosen, such as the Varilight V-Pro dimmer, which can operate in either trailing-edge or leading-edge mode to cater for the differing specifications of LED driver technologies in the market. Although the best LED dimmers in the
market will deliver a solid performance with the majority of dimmable LED loads “straight out of the box”, many also offer programmable features that can be used to optimise the performance of a particular LED load. These might include an on board stability program to provide flicker-free lighting at all brightness levels, the ability to alter the dimming range and exploit the full range of brightness levels available with adjustable minimum and maximum brightness settings as well as technology to overcome the failure of some
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