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

It takes a lot of energy to keep an apartment building running. Unlike a commercial office or most retail stores, apartment buildings are open to residents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. That's a non-stop schedule of keeping the HVAC running and lighting on.

But if you're an engineer at one of these apartment buildings, here's the good news for you: if you haven't already switched to long-life, energy-efficient lighting, you may be sitting on a gold mine of savings by simply upgrading your lighting.

Earlier this year, the Department of Energy published a report on LED failure that, among other things, found the lifetime claims for more than half of LED products to be inaccurate, or miscalculated.

Why is there so much bad information out there? Are manufacturers just fudging their claims, or are there other pieces to the puzzle?

Well, though we frequently stress the importance of vetting manufacturers, and manufacturer reps, a lot of this bad information just comes down to the industry adjusting to a new, still emerging and evolving lighting technology. That said, we're not here to make excuses for misleading or inaccurate lifetime claims. We're here to make the technicalities behind these inaccuracies understandable, so that you can effectively avoid the risk of getting left high-and-dry with early failures or poor light quality from LEDs.

As a company, Regency has always been driven by its values. We care deeply about serving customers well, valuing employees, and making an impact in the world around us. 

Alice + Olivia launched in 2002 as a women's fashion brand that was exclusively sold in Barneys New York. The company's steady growth over the last 15 years now has it selling its clothing in 50 different countries. And part of that growth has come through the brand's expansion to its own brick and mortar locations.

Alice + Olivia opened its first boutiques in New York and Los Angeles in the mid-2000s and has since gone on to open 38 worldwide.

Last year, we published our first-ever LED Buying Guide. We say over and over again around here that our goal is to make lighting easy for our customers, and the LED Buying Guide was published with that objective in mind.

The lighting world has undergone rapid changes over the last decade with the emergence and proliferation of light emitting diode (LED) lighting technology. Just seven years ago, in 2010, less than 10 manufacturers made up 90 percent of the lighting market. Last year, that market share was spread between more than 400 manufacturers, each with its own fluid, iterative product line.

That's a lot to keep up with.

So, how do we make things easier for you?

Poor Robert Kelly. He has all but lost his name. He is no longer Dr. Robert E. Kelly, political science professor at South Korea's Pusan National University and sought-after expert on South Korean politics. To most of the world, at least, Robert Kelly is now, simply, "BBC Dad."

If you haven't yet seen the video of BBC Dad's unfortunate, cringeworthy 15 seconds of fame, well, here it is.

March Madness is underway. We've got an office pool going and my bracket is a mad, blazing disaster.

Evidently, I don't know much about college basketball. I do know this, though: all of the lighting nerds tuning into the tournament should keep an eye on the performance of Eaton's Ephesus LED lighting system, which was on display over the weekend at some of the tournament's regional venues, like KeyBank Center in Buffalo, Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, BOK Center in Tulsa, and will light the Final Four next month at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz.

Recently, we've seen a swell in the number of building improvement projects taking place from a number of financially-savvy companies looking for tax write-off opportunities. And part of that probably has to do with a couple of bills passed near the end of the first session of the 114th U.S. Congress.

We wrote about these developments at the time but, as a review, here’s what the two bills do:

The computer, tablet, or smart phone you're reading this blog post on is brimming with complexity. What do you know about its anatomy? I know the computer I'm writing this blog post on has, let's see, a motherboard, a hard drive, and some RAM. Oh, and a battery that seems to hold a charge for less and less time. That's about it, to be honest.

With Super Bowl LI this weekend, we decided to republish this post, which recalls the power outage debacle during the big game at the Superdome several years back. (Also, as the Falcons fans in our Atlanta office would say, "Rise Up!")

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Remember Super Bowl XLVII a few years back? Even if you're not a football fan, you probably do. The Baltimore Ravens won, Beyoncé played the halftime show, and this awfully-emotive commercial debuted somewhere along the way. Maybe you don't remember any of that. But you probably remember this: the lights went out.