LED news and articles from Solas

Solas is called in by Studio MB - designers for Dynamic Earth - to help save the ‘new’ lighting to the permanent Ice Berg at this Edinburgh attraction.

Never being entirely happy with the new LED based lighting installed below the ice sculpture, when the units started failing due to the extreme conditions Solas was called in to advise on a more viable solution.

Solas saw immediately that a conventional solution using existing units was not going to be sufficient and designed units specifically to cope with two main requirements:
1. to provide a smooth wash of precisely controlled colour
2. to cope with extremes of temperature as well as occasional soakings in boiling water (used to defrost the lower layers of ice)

To solve the first requirement, Solas used strips of low powered LEDs which combined red, green & blue into each unit. The lower power allowed us to place the leds closer together and the use of tri-coloured LEDs meant each point of light was the required colour from the word go.

To cope with the extremes in temperature Solas encased the strips in tough polycarbonate tubing with IP rated stainless steel end caps. In addition, because of the performance regarding point 1, the units were able to be mounted much closer to the ice - this meant they did not have to sit on the base of the tank below the sculpture risking immersion in boiling/freezing water.

Each light unit was made to an exact size to match the 15 varied lengths of edging around the ice sculpture.