Why You Need LED Ex Lighting On Your Drilling Rig

Published 24 Sep 2019

Why You Need LED Ex Lighting On Your Drilling Rig

LED Ex Lighting

The hazardous area lighting you choose to install today will make the difference in plant safety, worker comfort and maintenance costs for years to come – affecting the overall running costs of your site.

Major issues can occur on drill rigs as they are reliant on power from generators – a lack of generating capacity can led to a massive expense. Decreasing the consumption from the present electrical equipment is a different solution that can be helped by LED technology.

LED technology can provide the same light output to traditional lighting reducing the amount of power used. A typical 400W SON floodlight (440W power consumption) can be replaced by an equivalent SPARTAN LED unit which will consume just 136W.

Switching to LED lighting on a drill rig could save around 16KW of generating capacity much cheaper than buying a new generator for the 50 odd floodlights. The generating capacity can be used for other equipment.

While the reduced consumption alone may warrant upgrading to LED luminaires, LED technology also offers a number of other benefits when compared to traditional Ex lighting.

Lighting When You Need It Most

Instability is a problem for the generators for drill rigs as a power outage can immoblise the lighting on site causing a major safety threat.

The emergency battery back up for the lighting is essential especially when the mains power fails – making it imperative to use LED technology on any drill rig. Traditional Ex lighting isn’t available as an emergency option given that the luminaire draws a very high current which is not suited to a backup battery.

However SPARTAN LED luminaires do have an emergency version where a battery back up module prevents a blackout even when the mains power fails significantly decreasing the chance of injury and incident on site.

If full power is lost SPARTAN LED luminaires will strike immediately, however during a short term voltage drop the full light output will operate only when it gets down to 100V will the emergency function kick in. In contrast, hot restrike for traditional technology commonly takes up to 15 minutes, while a tighter voltage range also makes it more prone to outages.

Raytec Spartan ATEX Crane Floodlights

Maintenance Savings

Maintenance costs need to be taken in to consideration as gaining access to a rig can be a difficult process as they are often found isolated locations that require specialist equipment. Traditional lighting technology would require the EX luminaire lamps to be changed frequently dramatically increasing the cost.

LED luminaires have an unrivaled lifespan of 10+ years reducing the frequency of lamp changes and time set aside for maintenance. SPARTAN luminaires have a modular design meaning PSU and LED modules can be removed and serviced independently, so SPARTAN can be supported on-site making the overall maintenance process a lot simpler.

The PSU on some units can even be located remotely at ground level. For example, PSUs on SPARTAN Flood luminaires can be located up to 100m away from the unit, meaning no matter where the area is located, there may be an opportunity to greatly improve ease of access, further increasing maintenance savings.

SPARATAN luminaires advantages are mainly thanks to the LED technology which is better suited to drill rig applications than traditional lighting. With worldwide certification (ATEX and IECEx plus US approval including C1D2) and an industry leading 5 year warranty, SPARTAN luminaires are the ideal choice when looking to switch or upgrade to LED.

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