Abigail Klein Leichman
February 14, 2016, Updated February 18, 2016

A futuristic outdoor lighting system from Gaash Lighting was introduced at an Israeli “smart cities” conference in Eilat last week.

The Apollo line of luminaires (complete lighting units), the result of two years of R&D by this veteran lighting company owned by Kibbutz Gaash, features a modular design, low-consumption LED dyes and high-flexibility optics to fit any type of outdoor setting from parks to highways.

In addition, in the near future each unit can be outfitted with a box to house a choice of components including cameras, sensors and Wi-Fi to advance the smart city, safe city and Internet of Things (IoT) trends worldwide.

Each unit will have its own IP address to facilitate machine-to-machine control of functions such as turning on, turning off or altering the intensity of the light in response to real-time circumstances.

Smart outdoor lighting solutions are in ever greater demand worldwide as a way to cut down significantly on energy costs and environmental pollution. Over the next decade, it is estimated that at least 1 billion bulbs will be replaced with LED at the urging of governments across the globe.

“Lately the whole industry is going through a big revolution from electricity to electronics, and from traditional bulbs to LED,” says Gaash Lighting CEO Dotan Buchsweiler. “We had to reinvent ourselves almost from scratch.”

The company, founded in 1964, has become the only LED manufacturer in Israel and provides end-to-end solutions from custom design to maintenance.

“From our experience in several projects in the last two years, we see that we can save around 70 percent of energy consumed by lighting when we replace a standard HID bulb with LED and add lighting control systems,” says Buchsweiler.

“We sell our traditional products mainly in the Czech Republic, Germany and England. We expect Apollo to be sold in many additional markets,” he says.

The engineering and industrial design of the luminaires was handled by Taga in Tel Aviv and Ziv-Av Engineering in Be’erot Yitzhak.

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