What happens when a bastion of fine lighting and a Bastion of fine dining cross paths? Everybody wins! Especially the patrons of Bastion, a wonderful restaurant in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood of Nashville. The restaurant’s parking lot has been greatly improved with an upgrade to state-of-the-art LED lighting to keep customers and employees safer at night.

Visit http://www.bastionnashville.com/ to learn more

The restaurant’s website provides the definition of bastion: A place or system in which something (such as an old fashioned idea) continues to survive. Here in Nashville, the old-fashioned ideas of excellent service and excellent food survive at Bastion, the restaurant. The old-fashioned ideas of excellent service along with superior outdoor lighting design and installation survive at Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Nashville.

Neighborhood Ties …

Bastion recently hired Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Nashville to replace the old lights in the restaurant’s parking lot. The Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, as you probably know, is home to several one-of-a-kind restaurants, art galleries and artist studios as well as First Tennessee Park in Germantown. What you may not know is that years ago, the founders of Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Nashville opened B&B Manufacturing just across Houston Street from where Bastion is located today. Bob Lyons Sr. and Bob Lyons Jr. started B&B Manufacturing to make the high-quality outdoor lighting fixtures they needed for their residential and commercial lighting installations.

Out With the Old, In With the New

The lights in Bastion’s parking lot that needed to be replaced were metal halide lights. While metal halide lights have served us all for many years at ball parks, in parking lots and along streets, commercial LED technology now offers benefits metal halide does not. The color temperature of LED lights is brighter/cooler, which is better for a parking lot because it’s more focused. More focused light contributes to safer surroundings and clearer visibility.

ADDITIONAL BENEFITS OF USING LEDS IN A PARKING LOT:

More energy efficient: Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Nashville replaced 400-watt metal halide lights with 150-watt LEDs. Watts measure energy efficiency, and increased energy efficiency means costs savings.

Longer lasting: While the life of metal halide lights is 6,000 to 15,000 hours, LEDs will last over 30,000 hours. This presents another cost savings because LEDs do not need to be replaced as often. Metal halide lights can produce 100 lumens per watt when new, and at 400 watts these lights initially produce 40,000 lumens. (Lumens measure the total amount of light visible to the human eye from a lamp or light source.) Within 6 months, a metal halide light degrades to the point that it may only produce 24,000 lumens. LEDs will eventually degrade, too, but over a number of years, not months.

Automated: The LEDs we installed in Bastion’s parking lot use photo cells that sense when daylight is fading, so the new lights come on automatically every night.

No warm-up time needed: LED lights appear bright instantly, as soon as you turn them on. Metal halide lights need 1-15 minutes to warm up. If you turn them off and back on, you must wait several minutes because they won’t produce light again until they have cooled off.

Whiter, brighter light: The LED lights we used for Bastion’s parking lot have a color temperature of 5,000 Kelvin (5,000K), a sweet spot for Kelvin and more like daylight. The color temperature of the metal halide lights was 4,000K, which means they produced a warmer—and yellower—light. The whiter (cooler) light is best for parking lots.

Light color stays true: The light an LED produces will remain the same color, while over time the metal halide lights begin to give off pink, green or blue hues. This is because the metal halide bulb burns mercury and other metal vapors in a vacuum tube. As the lights lose some of those metals, they exhibit color shifts.

No cycling on and off: Once an LED light is on, it stays on until you (or the photo cell) turns it off. As metal halide lights (and some other types, such as sodium-vapor lamps) begin to fail, they tend to cycle on and off, leading to an unsafe situation in parking lots!

No toxic materials: LEDs do not contain mercury, so they can be disposed of easily. (However, most LEDs available today are made of materials that can be recycled.) Metal halide lights contain mercury, hazardous waste.

Only the Best for Bastion’s Customers

By upgrading their parking lot lighting from metal halide to state-of-the-art LED, Bastion will save money on electricity and bulbs while also providing safer lighting for their customers and staff.

Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Nashville can help with all of your commercial and residential lighting needs. Contact us today at (615) 373 – 0638, or email us at olpnashville@outdoorlights.com. Please Nashville Commercial Outdoor Lighting to learn more!

David G. Todd, Outdoor Lighting Perspectives of Nashville.