Muller retail chain opts for LED lighting upgrades
Müller is continually expanding its network of stores and currently has around 720 retail outlets in Germany and the rest of Europe.
A concept for one-to-one replacement of the existing lighting has been developed in close cooperation with Müller Ladenbau GmbH. Compared to the existing fluorescent lamp systems in the stores, the LED solution consumes far less power and also provides light of impressive quality.
All Müller shops stand out from their surroundings thanks to their relatively high indoor illuminance levels. The lighting concept runs like a thread through all the stores and therefore helps to create a high recognition factor. A high level of background light is coupled with impressive and effective lighting at the entrance areas and around the escalators, together with uniformly backlit shop windows, shelf lighting with direct and indirect components and other special features such as plinth lighting integrated in the display stands.
"The function of the ceiling lighting in a Müller store is to provide a high level of background lighting so that the merchandise is clearly visible and the information easy to read," explained Wolfgang Geiselmann, Head of the Electrical Division at Müller Ladenbau and responsible for the lighting design.
"We offer an extremely wide range of products with around 185,000 different articles, including perfumes, personal care products, stationery, toys, multimedia, stockings, household goods, craft items, over-the-counter medicines and natural cosmetics – often small items with small labelling displayed next to each other on shelves," said Wolfgang Geiselmann. Uniform background lighting also helps customers find their way around the store. The wall shelf lighting combined with illumination of the upper wall areas and the clearly laid out 5-foot high display units ensure that customers instantly feel comfortable in the store and have a good overview of the products on sale.
One of the tasks facing Tridonic was to replace the TCL lamps in the existing ceiling louvre luminaires with suitable LED components. Müller wanted the external appearance of the luminaires with their three-dimensional design to remain unchanged so that customers would be unaware of any differences. The answer was to use linear Tridonic TALEXXmodule LLE LED modules. Two modules were installed in each luminaire. From a power draw of 42 W they produce a luminous flux of 5,000 lumen. Offering potential energy savings of more than 50 percent compared with the previous lighting, the LED solution from Tridonic for the ceiling louvre luminaires is one of the key components in the new lighting system for Müller.
To make the lighting easier on the eye Tridonic developed a special half-bowl-shaped PMMA cover for the LLE modules that breaks up the individual points of light. "In developing the linear cover for the ceiling louvre luminaires was to blend the individual points of light together to create a line of light and at the same time to level of translucence", explained Gisbert Schubert from the Technical Sales Service team at Tridonic. The ceiling louvre luminaires are also part of the air extraction system. They have openings at the ends so that air can be extracted. This also cools the LEDs, which in turns prolongs their life.
The new LED wall shelf lighting, which was installed for the first time in the Stuttgart Fasanenhof store opened at the start of February 2015, offers energy savings between 50 and 70 percent compared with the previous system based on T8 and T5 fluorescent lamps. The wall shelf lighting features both a direct and an indirect component. The latter has a protective cover and illuminates the wall and ceiling above the shelving. The direct LED light is focused by a lens with a high level of precision to provide uniform illumination of the shelving.
The shop window display areas are now backlit with energy-saving TALEXXchain CRYSTAL SELECT LED chains in a neutral white light colour. Thanks to their special lenses with an emission angle of 155°, the chains can achieve absolutely uniform illumination with only a small number of modules. An additional advantage is that thanks to the homogeneity of the LED chains the film on which the advertising messages are printed is more transparent and therefore lets more light through. This all helps achieve energy savings of around 80 percent for the shop window backlighting.
In all, there are ten different lighting situations that meet the various lighting requirements in the Müller store concept and which in future will feature LED technology from Tridonic. The existing stores will be gradually upgraded. The new stores such as the Stuttgart Fasanenhof store will have a complete LED system with all the benefits, namely energy savings, CO2 reduction, cost savings, high quality of light, extremely long maintenance intervals, and payback in only two years. And this does not even include savings in air conditioning costs. The LED lighting solutions are almost exclusively special versions developed by Tridonic specifically for Müller.
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