LED – panacea or marketing hype?

 However some observers believe its benefits are being over-sold, often to the detriment of other high-performing types of more ‘conventional lighting’, and to a sometimes uninitiated audience too easily swayed by slick sales patter. HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie spoke to one highly experienced lighting professional, Nicholas Bukorovi´c, a former employee of Thorn, Cooper, and Thorlux Lighting, and the principal author of the last CIBSE/Society of Light and Lighting (SLL) Guide LG2 on healthcare lighting, to seek some expert illumination.

Ahighly experienced electrical and building services engineer with a degree in Physics and a masters qualification in Architecture, Light, and Lighting, Nicholas Bukorovi´c has over 30 years’ lighting experience, having been ‘bitten by the lighting bug’ soon after he first trained ‘on the tools’. In his last role, with Thorlux Lighting, he spent two years as product development manager for healthcare systems. A Chartered Engineer, and widely acknowledged by his peers as a leading lighting ‘guru’ in the UK, he left Thorlux last August, and has since provided specialist lighting consultancy on a freelance basis, having had his own company, NBL Consultants, for some years. He was the principal author of the latest (published in 2008) CIBSE/SLL Lighting Guide, ‘LG2: Hospitals and healthcare buildings’, a publication that he explained, when I met him, is considered to be the most authoritative UK guide to lighting in healthcare. As a highly experienced lighting professional, Nicholas Bukorovi´c has wide-ranging expertise in, and knowledge of, many different forms of lighting, and, with his engineering and scientific background, also possesses a sound comprehension of the ‘science’ behind the various competing technologies that he feels enables him to cut a swathe through both the jargon and the ‘smooth sales talk’ employed by some suppliers.

 Thoughts on LED