In our latest customer interview, which took place at Labelexpo 2025, GEW’s Managing Director, Robert Rae, speaks to James Malone. James is the founder and CEO of Label Power, a label printer that was established in 1996, and has since grown into a respected partner for many businesses within Australia.
Rob and James discuss why the Label Power management team decided to install GEW’s AeroLED2 on their flexo presses. Read the interview below, or click here to watch the video interview:
Robert Rae (RR): Okay, James, nice to meet you. I’m Robert Rae from GEW. You’re James from…
James Malone (JM): Label Power in Australia.
RR: And I understand that recently you upgraded one of your machines to our AeroLED2 LED system?
JM: Yeah, correct. We recently had an Omet KFlex 530 wide, which had the LeoLED and we’ve found that to be quite good and easy to use. And one of the other presses that we also installed in the same year was a Bobst M5X which was a 10 colour 440 wide press which had all GEW UV. But we also had other presses in the plant, MPS presses and things, and running all the presses at once, it was too much power consumption which caused our power board to run too hot. It was $150,000 at least to upgrade the power and give up part of our car park for the substation. So we looked into upgrading part of the, or retrofitting part of the Bobst with the Aero2 air-cooled LED curing. We bought 5 cassettes.
RR: So originally you had an Omet with the LeoLED system on?
JM: Yeh.
RR: This was our original LeoLED one curing system and the curing power of that was fine for the speed that you needed to run on that machine?
JM: It was fine, yeh.
RR: And then your Bobst machine, you’re saying you had too much power in the factory and you needed to reduce the amount of power that you were drawing in order to…?
JM: Yeh we were running all the machines at once depending on how many colours we were running. But if we had lots of colours running on the machines, we were running too much power in the factory and overheating the power board.
RR: And the power company then was quoting you additional money to upgrade the power in the factory to draw more KVAS, have enough power to run all the UV systems at full power all the time? And so, Aldus, Chris Bodger from Aldus at the time, now CS Graphics, they were um they were quoting you to upgrade the Bobst M5 machine to our AeroLED2 system?
JM: It was when the AeroLED2 system came out with the higher curing power and that was the same as the water-cooled system, so we decided to go and purchase it.
RR: Yeah, our original AeroLED one system was lower power than the LeoLED one.
JM: That’s right.
RR: But now the AeroLED2 system came out with the same curing power as our old LeoLED one system, then it was a bit of a no-brainer, was it, to upgrade to the AeroLED2 system?
JM: Exactly. And the advantage was by having the interchangeable cassettes, we now have a lot of spare conventional UV cassettes as well, so we have spare reflectors and spare bulbs, you know, so it made sense to do the upgrade.
RR: So how much, do you know how much it brought your power consumption down, by switching to the AeroLED2 system? Or you just know that it came down enough to be able not to do the power upgrade?
JM: We just got a feeling from your website where we did the calculations uh that it would just take enough off for us that we continue to run both machines at once, at least those two and the other machines at once and we’ve been been running pretty much all machines without any power restrictions since the upgrade, which is great.
RR: When was the upgrade done?
JM: Um, only recently, but about a month ago.
RR: Okay, and you’re finding that the power consumption is down low enough now that you’re not tripping out the substation, you haven’t had to do the upgrade?
JM: Correct.
RR: And you’re able to run all the machines with all colours? Without any restrictions on printing speed?
JM: Yeh, some of the older presses still have conventional LED (James meant conventional UV here), so we’re not loading it up too much, but we are definitely finding that it’s, I think it has made a difference.
RR: Okay. And the, and the curing power of the AeroLED2 system, I mean theoretically the power output is the same as the LeoLED one system. How have you found the curing and the performance, in reality?
JM: It’s still early days yet. And I know when they first did the install, there were some, some issues, but they had to do some adjustments, but we haven’t had any complaints since. So, I think it’s all running, it’s all going fine now.
RR: Yeah. Okay. And how long do you estimate the return on investment will be for an, for the investment in an AeroLED2 system? I mean, you were looking at potentially an enormous bill to upgrade the power in the factory.
JM: Well, exactly. And I haven’t worked out what the return is with the power consumption savings, but I know obviously we won’t be replacing the normal conventional UV bulbs as much. Um, and also we don’t have to pay out $150,000 for the power upgrade.
RR: How much was the power upgrade?
JM: $150,000.
RR: $150,000 to upgrade the power in order to solve the problem?
JM: Exactly.
RR: But instead you just upgraded to the AeroLED2 and you’ve been able to keep running without that upgrade.
JM: Exactly.
RR: That’s a, that’s an enormous saving. Okay. Well, thanks very much for your time today James, we appreciate it.
JM: Thank you.
Watch the interview
To learn more about AeroLED2, go here.
And to visit the Label Power website, click here.
Lastly, to speak to CS Graphics, our distributor in Australia and New Zealand, visit their website here.