Practical advice on commercial lighting from LED retrofits to lighting design.

We teach HID part numbers on Fridays in our School of Lighting program, and that's fitting because they're pretty easy, relative to fluorescents and incandescents. 

After new employees spend hours trying to memorize chart after chart for incandescent and fluorescent part numbers, HIDs feel like a gift. 

And if you've been tracking with our part numbers series so far, you might feel the same way, now that we've arrived at HIDs.

Lighting manufacturers speak different dialects of the same language: part numbers. The point of our part number series is to help you to better understand what all of those characters on your light bulb mean, so you can accurately and easily order replacement products.

Understanding part numbers is especially helpful when manufacturers begin to phase out and discontinue certain products, causing you to have to buy replacement products from another manufacturer. That's especially useful if you have compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, with so many manufacturers beginning to phase them out of production.

We recently wrote about incandescent bulb part numbers, discussing the difficulties that come with translating a native language into a secondary language.

Some people say that there are certain languages that are easier to translate than others, because of how they are structured.

Growing up in Japan, I learned quite a bit about the challenges that come with learning a second language. I remember having both English-speaking and Japanese-speaking friends and being the translator between the two groups. And I had to work hard to make sure information didn't get lost in translation.

Oftentimes, there were tricky moments for me, as the translator. Like, when my English-speaking friends would tell a joke while smiling, that smile was perceived as nervousness by my Japanese friends. The cultures were so different, each having so many nuances, that most communications had challenges like that. I was constantly trying to figure out how to accurately capture the intent, the context, and proper body language from the native culture and properly translate it for the other culture.

About a year ago, I was on a Costco run, but was turned away when I arrived. It was the middle of the day and the whole store was shut down.

Care to guess why?

I recently took a few of our new hires around some office spaces, hospitals, and hotels to observe lighting out in its natural habitat.

The majority of what we saw were fluorescent tubes. They're everywhere and their sheer ubiquity seemed to surprise a lot of the new hires who were with me, considering today's emphasis on LEDs. The fact is, fluorescents were so widely used for so long, and last so long, and remain one of the least expensive options on the market, that it's really not all that surprising that they're still everywhere.

Now, although the technology is the same, and they are all tubes, there are actually best practices around where you should and shouldn't use different tubes.

Have you ever heard a light bulb buzz?

If you answered yes, you’re actually wrong. The buzzing you hear is not coming from the bulb itself. It’s actually coming from the ballast.

Nerdy lighting technicalities, I know. . . Ballasts, light bulbs –– it's all the same, isn't it?

Well, not exactly. If you need to cover some basics on what a ballast is, try reading this article, “What is a ballast?” 

When I first started working at Regency, I knew little about lighting. I knew what an incandescent light bulb was and who Thomas Edison was. I knew that the lighting that came in tubes was fluorescent. And I knew that LEDs were becoming a thing. Beyond that, pretty much nada.

So needless to say, when I was in lighting training and first heard about high intensity discharge (HID) lighting technology, I had no real framework for what that was or where it was used. It just sounded foreign. And, well, intense.

In our last lighting technology post, we discussed fluorescent technology and how they produce artificial light. After fluorescents came compact fluorescents.

At Regency, we use The Lighting Pyramid to help guide the priorities of retrofit-interested customers. The Lighting Pyramid illustrates the fact that as lighting technology advanced, wattage and lumens no longer have a direct relationship. Today, you can purchase lighting that consumes significantly less watts but produces far greater lumens –– you don't always need to consume more energy to produce greater light. 

Fluorescent lighting. You probably already have an idea of what it is. Maybe you even understand a little about how it works. 

Yes, fluorescent technology is the lighting that is known for hurting your eyes and washing out your complexion. Well, that’s at least all I knew about it before taking a job at a lighting company.

But there's a lot more to fluorescent lighting than just the not-so-ideal side effects, including some nice benefits. In this post, we'll discuss how fluorescent lighting works, where to use it, and its pros and cons. Hopefully, your eyes will still feel okay by the end of this post.

Before we dive too deeply into this post, let's briefly define fluorescent lighting.

What is fluorescent lighting?

Simply put, fluorescent lighting is a kind of lighting technology which depends on a chemical reaction inside of a glass tube to create light. This chemical reaction involves gases and mercury vapor interacting, which produces an invisible UV light. That invisible UV light illuminates the phosphor powder coating the inside of the glass tube, emitting white "fluorescent" light.