Screen Room LED's

[ebscreen]

Building out our new screen room, and wondering about work lighting. We've always used the UV blocking sleeves on fluorescent bulbs,
but I've always hated being under that weird yellow light.

It's a drop ceiling, and my thought was a couple of those drop in LED replacement panels. From what I've read, regular LED's emit almost no
UV light, and especially at a distance of 8 feet or so it shouldn't be an issue. My concern is long term accumulation, some of our higher mesh screens
may be sitting around a month or so.

Anyone have any real world experience with LED lighting in screen/storage rooms?

[mk162]

We run just cheap LED tubes and put clear UV sleeves on them. 

[GraphicDisorder]

We have LED Lights in our entire shop, high bay out in warehouse/print area and also normal LED in our offices. We coat/image/burn in direct light, no dark room here. We did mention to the light people the type of work we did and he did make a choice on light color but not sure what it is to be honest.

I just know we never have screen issues and I didn't want to mess around with a darkroom, our building doesn't really have a great spot for that.

[ebscreen]

Got it, appreciate the input.  We have a bunch of huge skylights, it's like being outside in here, so we have to have a dark room, plus we would
need like a million cabinets to store screens so we had to build this one out. It's the long term storage/exposure that gets me, can be such
a hard thing to pinpoint, IE "maybe we could have gotten a little more detail out of that one". I guess I could image a high mesh screen and leave
it sitting for a couple weeks for testing.

[GraphicDisorder]

Got it, appreciate the input.  We have a bunch of huge skylights, it's like being outside in here, so we have to have a dark room, plus we would
need like a million cabinets to store screens so we had to build this one out. It's the long term storage/exposure that gets me, can be such
a hard thing to pinpoint, IE "maybe we could have gotten a little more detail out of that one". I guess I could image a high mesh screen and leave
it sitting for a couple weeks for testing.

Ya with sky lights you probably need to do it. Here we've left screens certainly for hours out, not normal thing but its happened. Without any noticeable affect.

[Admiral]

We also use high bay LEDs.  They do expose screens, I forget how long it takes but I believe when I did the quarter test with it they were pretty well exposed in 15 minutes with the LED closer than normal (6-8' away). 

I started with UV blocking amber film.  Worked great for 2-3 years.  Turns out the LED burned through the amber film where it was strongest and turned the film clear and stopped working.  Our screens were exposing, mainly the ones on top of racks.  I then bought 1/8" thick acrylic amber UV blocking sheets and lasered out circles along with holes for bolts to go through and connect with a standoff to the high bay LED lights.  Has worked perfect for 5+ years and the darkroom isn't too dark at all.

I did also tint the window across one of the doors to the darkroom (huge 5'x8' window) and the small window on the swinging door there.  That UV was definitely exposing screens at first lol.

UV Process Supply is where I got that UV blocking amber acrylic but they seem to have gone out of business unfortunately.

[ebscreen]

We had high bay led's in the last shop, could definitely see those exposing screens. The lights we just installed are
only 40 watts, basically a replacement for drop ceiling fluorescent troffers. I'm crossing my fingers that it's not an issue.
Gonna do the quarter test for 8 hours tomorrow, we use diazo emulsion so it's both slow exposing and very obvious
when it is exposed.

The only place I've been able to find amber/rubylith rolls is on ebay, and those people think the stuff is made out of gold or something.
If we end up needing a filter I'll probably just order more of the welding-safe strip door we just installed, it would be kind of perfect.

Hoping we don't need it though, I can not stand working in yellow light. I'm not even in the screen room that often but it irks the eff out of me.
Anyone else have that issue?

[mk162]

If they have the troffer style, put some UV film on the inside of the light diffuser. It's cheap and works great. Might run $20-30 for a some pieces big enough

[ebscreen]

If they have the troffer style, put some UV film on the inside of the light diffuser. It's cheap and works great. Might run $20-30 for a some pieces big enough

Now I'm going down a rabbit hole of window films I didn't know existed. I might apply this stuff to all the skylights,
I kinda worry about sun damage to inks and thread and whatnot.

[mk162]

If they have the troffer style, put some UV film on the inside of the light diffuser. It's cheap and works great. Might run $20-30 for a some pieces big enough

Now I'm going down a rabbit hole of window films I didn't know existed. I might apply this stuff to all the skylights,
I kinda worry about sun damage to inks and thread and whatnot.

We ended up putting a light coat of white spray paint on the inside of our skylights.  They were crystal clear and you'd get a sunburn hanging out under one.