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For over a decade Advance has been providing bespoke lighting solutions to the Point of Sale industry and is now a leading pan European supplier to manufacturers, brands and POS design houses.

 

Our in-house design and prototyping services allow us the flexibility to value engineer designs and create cost effective, energy efficient solutions.  This, coupled with our variable manufacturing and assembly offer, make us a valuable partner in the POS industry.

 

 

 

For more information on our point of sale products please contact our Point of Sale Manager on 01332 865777.

 

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Panel UK are the UK’s leading provider of bespoke office screen systems and supply many of the High Street banks.  By incorporating their screens into modular free standing furniture, they can also create innovative retail interior solutions.

In early 2009, Panel were tasked with incorporating a double sided A0 light box into their existing aluminium furniture design.  The key criteria within the brief was for the solution to be as cost effective, energy efficient and environmentally friendly as possible.

It was quickly established that one of the major costs to the client was the in-store maintenance required to replace lamps, etc.  Therefore a very reliable solution with a long life was required.

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Traditionally a light box of this size would have required a number of fluorescent tubes to effectively illuminate the required area, however LED’s were investigated initially because of their reliability.  In general terms LED’s have reliability approximately 4 times that of an equivalent fluorescent lamp, but the initial cost is high.  For a light box of this size a large number of LED’s would be required to produce the same effect as the fluorescent lamps and the payback period was deemed too high.

After extensive research, Advance recommended the use of Philips Xtreme long life fluorescent lamps for this application. These are fluorescent lamps that use different technology to the traditional fluorescent lamps resulting in a lifetime of more than 50,000 hours (based on a 3 hour switching cycle). 

Combining these lamps with reliable high frequency ballasts resulted in a very reliable lighting system with a life equivalent to LED’s, but at a fraction of the cost.  Another factor to take into account was the fact that the technology used in the Philips Xtreme fluorescent lamps uses a very low amount of Mercury compared to other fluorescent lamps (less than 5mg).

By working together with Panel UK, Advance was able to investigate the requirements for the lighting for this light box, evaluate a number of potential designs and then create an innovative solution that was not only extremely efficient, but met all of the specified criteria.