From day one, our mission has been to design and build solar lighting that would work all night and be aesthetically pleasing wherever our lighting is installed. Our success is the result of engineering and innovating core technologies including solar panels, batteries, electronics and drivers, LEDs, optics, metals and finishes, enlisting designers to ensure our lights are aesthetically pleasing, and developing unique, intelligent controls that ensure extraordinary performance.
Technology
We approach solar lighting technology with a continuous improvement mindset to make outdoor lighting simpler, more reliable, and more sustainable than any other option. FLT’s proprietary technologies paired with carefully engineered components designed and built to our standards allow our architectural lights to deliver all-night performance virtually anywhere in the world.
The FLT Difference
Solar Lighting and Adaptive Intelligence
The amount of solar energy available depends upon the location, time of year, and prevailing weather conditions. Finding the right solar lighting solution historically has involved site specific modeling to determine the right solution. This made for a complicated and lengthy design process.
Our innovative solution to these problems has been the development of Adaptive Intelligence – capabilities within all our bollards and pole-mounted luminaires. These capabilities allow FLT’s lights to learn about their surroundings and configure their performance to be optimized under all conditions. The result is the appropriate production of light and illumination where it’s desired and not wasted – all with the highest reliability.
The Elements of FLT’s Solar Powered Luminaires
Adaptive Intelligence
The ability to adjust and change based on our surroundings and environment is something humans do naturally. At FLT, we have applied that idea to our lights. From the instant they are installed on-site, they know where in the world they are. They know what time it is. And they immediately begin monitoring their solar generation and battery life so that they can pro-actively manage and adjust their lighting performance to ensure constant light output, without extra programing or human intervention.
Design & Materials
FLTs focus on design allows us to create lights that are aesthetically pleasing, easily installed, and able to withstand the elements for decades or more.
FLT integrates our solar panels into the lighting design, eliminating the need to have a separate panel perched above the light like an extra appendage.
By sourcing our metals and manufacturing our light’s bodies and poles in North America, we ensure the durability and finishes of our lights wherever they’re installed.
Our designers consider every detail of our customers’ experience setting up our lights. With careful attention to the design and every part of each light, FLT’s lights can be unboxed and setup in 15 minutes or less. Our installation instructions fit on one side of one piece of paper. The work our design team does in advance makes our lights simple to install by virtually anyone.
Integration – Sunlight to light at night
From the time sunlight begins to shine on FLTs solar panels, six technology processes take place before our light is on the ground. FLT’s attention to every step of the process from the design and selection of the components to their integration means that at the end of the day, FLT’s lights have more power and can use it more efficiently than other solar lights. When compared to others, FLT has more power to deliver light – as much as 30% more – than other solar solutions.
The Parts that make up FLT’s Solar Powered Luminaires
LEDs
Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are the true stars of the show—visible every night and central to the performance of our lights. That’s why choosing the right LEDs is critical to FLT’s success. Our standards are exceptionally high: the LEDs must be highly efficient, deliver outstanding light quality, and be built to endure. They need to perform reliably in extreme conditions—heat, humidity, and sub-zero cold. To meet these demands, we use LEDs from the same manufacturers trusted in automotive headlights, smartphone flashes, and rugged applications like maritime, airfield, and tunnel lighting. In short, our LEDs are engineered to handle whatever nature throws at them—night after night.
Solar Panels
Solar panels must efficiently convert as much sunlight as possible into power that can be stored in the batteries regardless of weather or conditions. FLT uses specific panel technology that allows us to maximize power generation and transmission. The panel’s circuit design means that even if dust or leaves, for example, land on the panel, power production will continue, and the batteries will be charged.
Batteries
At night, FLT’s batteries are the beating heart of our lights. And though the concept of a battery is simple, like those in an EV, need to be extremely efficient, recharge thousands of times over their lifetime, and deliver upon demand, regardless of conditions.
We have written our own battery specifications for everything from the chemical makeup of the battery, its physical design, and performance over time. The batteries that meet our specifications are robust enough to withstand the conditions inside a light pole, retain their efficiency over thousands of charges and their expected lifetime, and deliver their energy all night every night.
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