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

Whether your multifamily building is apartments, condos, or retirement homes, you're probably facing a common problem: energy costs.

Multifamily properties are an increasingly popular housing option. Around one in six households in the United States live in an apartment or condo.

It's no wonder why energy costs are so high. You're supplying multiple families who choose their own air conditioning set points and light levels.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that if every multifamily property made energy-efficient upgrades, utility costs would decrease by $3.4 billion across the U.S.

When is the right time to retrofit your HID lighting to LED? It can be an expensive project, and you're probably wondering if the energy savings are worth it.

HID (or high intensity discharge) replacement bulbs aren't the cheapest. Plus, because of their high light output, they're usually in hard-to-reach areas like stadiums, gyms, warehouses, and parking lots or garages. Even changing a light bulb can mean extra costs.

Bo Klune is our Regional Lighting Specialist Manager who oversees the Dallas and Atlanta regions. Bo has many years of experience in the lighting industry – finding the most efficient energy savings for his customers. Every day we answer countless questions surrounding the topic of energy savings so he's here to help answer some of the most common. Here's Bo with more: 

We've used our Lighting Insights blog to help readers understand light bulb part numbers so they can more accurately replace or retrofit their lighting. Another piece of the part number puzzle is ANSI code, which can help to pair ballasts with lamps.

What are ANSI codes?

ANSI stands for "American National Standards Institute," which is an organization that develops standards for a wide range of commercial products. In lighting, ANSI codes have particular relevance to common types of light bulbs, but they are less and less common in the modern lighting world. That said, they remain a useful piece of information for finding the right ballast for your lighting.

We’ve written a fair amount on when the right time is to upgrade to LED. It seems like this is one of the most charged questions in lighting today with strong opinions on both sides of the spectrum.

Some pragmatists look at the cost of long-life fluorescent – both in terms of efficiency and low materials cost – and recommend a conservative approach to retrofitting to LED. Heavy proponents of LED point to the mercury in linear fluorescents, LEED points, and the energy savings and can’t imagine operating without LED.