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

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.

What products should you retrofit to LED first? 

Our lighting experts get that question all the time. Fortunately, there’s a pretty simple answer.

If you have any applications in your building that still have incandescent or halogen lighting, start there first. Why?

The retrofit from incandescent or halogen to LED gives you the biggest energy savings and almost always the fastest return on investment. We all want to make our money back quickly on investments, right? If you’re using linear or compact fluorescent lighting anywhere in your building, your lighting is already fairly efficient, especially when compared with incandescent or halogen lighting. 

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.

Interest in low voltage, or 12v, lighting has grown in our increasingly energy-conscious customers over the last several years, with the emergence and proliferation of long-life, energy-efficient lighting. 

But to properly understand the full benefits of low voltage lighting, we should start here: low voltage lighting is more of a tactical application than a budgetary or energy-saving one, though there may be moderate gains in these areas in certain instances.

This is the second in our series of articles meant to take the mystery out of savings and payback calculations for lighting. From designers to engineers to executives, lighting projects are more commonly cross-functional decisions.

This article focuses on one of the least-covered questions on savings calculations for lighting projects: How can a lighting retrofit save you money on HVAC costs?

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.

Here at Regency we're well aware that lighting can be complicated, that's why here on the Lighting Insights blog we aim to help answer your questions and make lighting easy for you. Not only do we enjoy reading and writing about lighting, but we enjoy finding and watching helpful videos on 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.

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.

If you're responsible for determining the right ambiance and light quality of your application, then you probably already know how important understanding Color Rendering Index (CRI) and Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) is.

Here's the problem: CRI and CCT are anything but easy to understand.

Color Rendering Index is calculated based on how well a light source renders eight specific pastel colors. The theory is if it light renders these colors well, it should render all colors well. CRI is a simple and helpful lighting spec to predict how good the visual output of a lighting product will be.

Correlated Color Temperature (CCT or just color temperature) gauges how yellow or blue light appears. It’s measured in Kelvin and usually falls in a range between 2200 and 6500 Kelvin degrees. Warm light sources have low color temperatures (2200-3000K), featuring red, orange, and yellow colors. Cool light sources have high color temperatures (>4000K) and feature blue light.