"It is a misunderstanding to think LED lights do not get dirty"

July 8, one day later than the cyclists, the ‘Tour de France’ also started for the lighting cleaners of Lightshine Cleaning. And just like the cyclists, the men of Lightshine Cleaning had a lot of ‘cycling days’ under their belts. If you kept an eye on the Twitter account of Lightshine Cleaning in the past months, you will have seen a lot of European countries. Growers in the Netherlands, Belgium, England, France, Denmark, and Poland were visited by the cleaning teams from Monster.

Jeffrey van den Bogert, Lightshine Cleaning: “We kicked off the cleaning season in the beginning of May, and now we can speak of ‘high season’. At this moment we are cleaning a lot of light covers for tomato growers. In this time of the year they do not need lighting, and that is the ideal moment for us to come and clean the covers. But we have also visited a lot of flower growers, although they want their cleaning done at the end of the summer, so they will be clean for the winter. In winter they have the highest need for light, and clean covers help.”

Some growers have the covers ready in boxes when the guys of Lightshine Cleaning pay a visit, but other growers let the cleaning teams execute the entire process of disassembling and assembling. Jeffrey: “During the summer we have a team taking care of the entire process. Mostly smaller companies choose to have to entire process done by us, because they do not have to provide extra personnel. We take care of everything so they don’t have to worry.”

By now it's no longer just SON-T lamps which are cleaned by Lightshine Cleaning. Also growers with LED lighting are starting to see the importance of the clean LED lighting. Jeffrey: “It is a misunderstanding to think that LED lighting does not get dirty, because they will. Particularly inter-lights, hanging between the crops get dirty more quickly because of the contact with leaves, and by spraying activities on the crops. “Since two years there is a special cleaner for LED lighting. Even though LED is more energy efficient, it is still a waste to lose light to dirty lamps. Every percent of light is a gain.”