Architectural consultancy, Michael Hall Associates, selected Zeta Specialist Lighting’s Ecolux Solar LED trough lighting system, which is ‘entirely powered by solar’, to illuminate a newly designed wayfinding system at Bradford’s Lynfield Mount Hospital.
Michael Hall Associates was commissioned to re-design the legacy wayfinding signage across the four-acre site. The existing signage fell short of the Department of Health’s best practice guidelines for effective wayfinding systems for healthcare facilities, which also stipulate ensuring optimum levels of illumination at all times of day.
The legacy signs were unlit, and with no mains power, a traditional lighting solution would have required laying cabling. The new system comprises 2 x 2.5 m signs at both of the NHS hospital’s entrances, and a further six wayfinding signs incorporating key information for visitors strategically placed across the site. Zeta’s Ecolux Solar is reportedly the industry’s first solar LED trough lighting system.
Developed in partnership with Portland Lighting, it boasts a new ‘Super Lens’, which enables even illumination on signs up to three metres deep. The system uses ‘discreet and flexible’ PV solar panels, long-life batteries, and Zeta’s ‘innovative Energy Management System (EMS)’, which releases the stored energy and uses it to power the high intensity LED trough light ‘to provide optimum, efficient LED illumination’.
Zeta says the system is ‘virtually maintenance-free’, while the LEDs have an average rated life of 50,000 hours.