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

Regardless of what your retail store sells, lighting is one of the most important components of a successful retail space. Lighting mistakes rarely go unnoticed and can have a direct impact on a customer’s shopping experience – and we all know what happens when a customer’s shopping experience is poor.

Whether your restaurant offers 4 for $4 promotions or provides guests with an extensive wine list, one item you always want to serve is proper lighting. Restaurant lighting of any capacity needs to be warm, inviting, and consistent with your brand. But how do you create the perfect recipe for success? 

There's a long and heated debate about the use of incandescent light bulbs. We have debunked the myth that incandescent bulbs were banned in the US, but the reality is that efficiency standards have changed the way consumers shop for lighting. 

And with changing efficiency standards come changes in product availability. 

Regardless of your stance on the political side of this issue, we still need light in our homes, offices, schools, gyms, airports – you get the idea. So, we get regular questions about where to buy incandescent light bulbs or what the best options are for converting to LED. 

We're interested in making lighting easy for our customers, so we've put together a list of the most common places you might find an incandescent bulb along with links for where you can buy either the incandescent product or a compatible LED upgrade. 

With the number of LED options available today, you may feel stuck by indecision when it comes to updating the lighting for your facility. With the advancement of technology, the decision making process has become much more complicated. Color temperature. Color Rendering Index. Lumen output. And the list goes on and on. 

Here are three basic tips to follow when it comes to retrofitting your lighting. 

This is the fourth article in our series exploring savings and payback calculations for lighting retrofits. The complexity of lighting payback calculations can make your head spin and make you wonder what applies to you and what doesn't.  

This article focuses on the labor savings that you gain when you switch to long-life lighting products, like LED.

When it comes to a lighting retrofit, you want to be able to accurately predict what kind of savings you’ll get after everything’s said and done. Accurate savings estimates make a deposit of trust and expertise in your account when you go to your boss for that next money-saving project. 

How does lighting affect your electricity bill? How much will a lighting retrofit save you? How do you begin to estimate the value of a potential lighting rebate? 

There’s one common thread that runs through each of these questions: the difference between watts (W), kilowatts (kW), and kilowatt-hours (kWh).

The energy industry is almost as bad as the lighting industry at using abbreviations and jargon, so we’ll try to break each of these down with some practical examples.

In this article, I’m going to use the analogy of equating electricity to water. This is a common analogy that we can’t claim it as our own, but hopefully our specific examples will shed some light on this important question.