Green Design: A Plurality of Benefits
Soltech’s purpose-built turtle-friendly solar lights have several additional benefits. We tailor the light emitted from LEDs to be harmless to turtles. This also preserves marine-life, nightscapes, and human health.
Measuring Light
Crafting lights for targeted applications requires learning about two key units of lighting measurement. The Nanometer light scale & the Kelvin light scale are two of the most common ways of differentiating light. The nanometer scale is pictured above. According to lumen learning, “Visible light…is the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be detected by the human eye…A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 390 to 750 nm”. The human eye detects most color as electromagnetic radiation waves at certain lengths measured in nanometers, pictured above under the visible light bracket. Kelvin temperature, pictured below, is another way to interpret light and color, with less harsh, more orange on one end and more blue on the other. The Kelvin scale is a less accurate way of interpreting color. A 2,500 Kelvin light which appears orange still has a significant amount of 400-500 nanometer short wavelength blue light waves in it. This differs from the nanometer scale, which can be used to include or exclude highly specific nanometer ranges of light for certain applications requiring only a specific type of light.
Nanometer-Optimized LEDs
One application of Soltech’s targeted nanometer wavelength lights are the LEDs which emit only long wavelengths. Unlike standard lights, these exclude the short, often blue wavelengths by shining at 580 nanometers, which is invisible to turtles. This also virtually eliminates the visible light to fish and marine life because underwater eyes are best at discerning shades of blue.
In coastal areas, turtles can be disrupted by standard street lights with short wavelengths which mirror moonlight-and artificially signals turtle breeding season. Premature turtle migration, roadkill, and driver risk follow as coastal roads are overrun.
The Custom Lighting Solution
To preserve eco-systemic balance, our custom LED chips only emit long 580-595 nanometer amber-colored light. Using blue-free long wavelength light invisible to turtles and most marine life has several advantages. Namely, it minimizes light pollution, protects human retinas, & preserves the sleep/wake circadian rhythm. Keeping light within this NM window is the only option, because although standard LEDs can also produce low Kelvin amber light, they still shine short wavelengths, while our lights only emit the safe nanometer range best for turtles, fish, humans, and the night sky. Because our off-grid lights are powered by the sun, they do not require uprooting natural habitats to run electrical lines and they eliminate the carbon emissions of traditional on-grid lights which, domestically, are 63.5% powered by fossil fuels. After 20 years of lighting manufacturing, we tailor-make these solar-powered LEDs to consistently perform over thousands of miles of installations. We can put these LEDs into any of our lights. Soltech defends our planet, its animals, and your eyes.
The Soltech turtle & marine LED nanometer light range (left) is a narrow window invisible to turtles and safe for human eyes, marine-animal eyes, the night sky, and the general environment. Keeping the spectrum in this narrow window optimizes these functions. Regular LEDs (right) can produce a low 2,500 Kelvin spectrum that might appear equivalent to our amber LEDs, but the nanometer spectrum is still wide and therefore visible to marine life, more harmful to retinas, and causes more light pollution.