Officials at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK, was looking to save money and energy when it chose to upgrade lighting of its rare collections of anthropological and archaeological artifacts.
The University of Oxford’s electrical staff turned to Soraa, Fremont, Calif., for the solution. Soraa worked with its UK partners, 4D Lighting, to supply the lamps to the Pitt Rivers Museum. The university installed 500 Soraa Vivid MR16 LED lamps that are estimated to save the museum £45,000 over the next five years and to reduce its carbon emissions by 44 tons each year.
More than 400,000 people visit the museum annually to get a glimpse of the deep past. Their experience now will be illuminated by lighting that is “doing its part to save the future,” said Soraa in a release. The new lighting also emits no harmful ultra-violet light, protecting the museum’s artifacts from light damage.
While increased efficiency was a goal, it was more important that the artifacts and exhibits be flawlessly illuminated and rendered. The lighting designers for the museum chose lamps with Soraa’s Violet-Emission 3-Phosphor (VP₃) technology to showcase the industrial design of the space and to illuminate the colors and whiteness of the relics on display. Using every color in the rainbow, especially deep red emission, Soraa’s lamps render warm tones accurately and achieve a color-rendering index (CRI) of 95 and deep red (R9) rendering of 95. Unlike blue-based white LEDs without any violet emission, the company’s lamps have violet emissions to properly excite fluorescing brightening agents, including natural objects like human eyes and teeth, as well as manufactured white materials, such as textiles and paper.
“The Soraa LED lamp produces color rendition that is comparable to a halogen light source,” said Robert Gregg, University of Oxford. “Utilizing the Soraa SNAP system, we now have the flexibility to adjust the beam angles for our many displays.”