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

As a lighting specialist that deals with mostly restaurant clients, Brandon Melton faces the topic of LED dimming almost daily. Brandon has many years in the lighting world and works with some of Regency's largest restaurant chain customers to eliminate common LED dimming issues and properly light their spaces. Here's Brandon with more:

As we start a new year full of new retrofit, design, and maintenance projects, we've updated our Lighting Terms Glossary to include some important terms that you'll want to be aware of this year. 

When you’re ready to make the leap to LED lighting, it can be a little scary. There are a number of different terms and performance metrics that can make a simple thing feel hard. 

Let me help you sort through a few of the most common specs, and offer you an easy way out!

Check out Regency's online Lighting Glossary for a more extensive list of lighting terms. 

The American Girl brand has been around since 1986 and is deeply embedded in so many childhood memories. They have a foundation of helping girls all over the world to build strong character and reach their full potential. 

The impact of LED lighting on the seeming endless sea of options is greater than just a few new — significantly more efficient — options for a table lamp or track fixture. LED technology has brought plenty of new replacement products, but it has also introduced a whole new category of options: LED fixtures. 

This is a question we commonly address: “I’d like to go with LED lighting, but how do I know if I should go with a screw-in replacement product or a new LED fixture?”

Of course, whether you're switching to an LED screw-in or a brand new LED fixture, you're probably well-acquainted with the lighting technology's many advantages. One important one to highlight here: the lumen output, or brightness, doesn't depreciate with LED like it does with fluorescent or HID technology. The lumen output will remain the same over the life of the product whether you go with a replacement lamp or fixture. 

Our goal here on the Lighting Insights Blog is to offer helpful answers to common lighting questions and to keep you posted on key developments in the industry.

There are a lot of big numbers that get thrown around in lighting retrofit discussions. The savings –– from the cost of energy to the lessened maintenance workload –– can be eye-popping.

Yet, oftentimes, the only number that is really eye-popping to your boss is that of upfront cost.

The reality is, no matter how common sense a retrofit may seem, big expenditures rarely get passed swiftly. (And sometimes, the sheer size of the number on the price tag can delay a quick-ROI, "common sense" project for years.)

If you're like so many of our lighting-savvy customers who have had trouble getting budgetary approval for an energy-saving lighting conversion, maybe one of the ideas below can help you to get something pushed through and start saving your company money with a refreshed look.

Last year, we helped the Staples Center in Los Angeles retrofit to LED lighting. Between that venue and the adjacent Microsoft Theater, the property manager retrofitted over 100 fixtures to LED, bringing the cost of energy down to 25 percent of what the venues used to pay, when they were using metal halide fixtures. Check out our case study here.

But their decision had more to do with maintenance than energy, which can be extremely difficult in hard-to-reach areas. 

That brings us to our first reason why venues like the Staples Center and the Microsoft Theater are rapidly retrofitting to LED:

Earlier this year, I was talking with a project manager for a mid-sized national restaurant chain about the challenges of getting a store properly lit (and properly dimmed). "If I open a store a year late and a million dollars over budget, as long as it looks good, I'm not worried about losing my job. But if it's Friends and Family Night and my CEO asks me to dim the lighting and it flickers, I'm worried."

Perhaps you've been in the same shoes, and you're well acquainted with the importance and difficulty of restaurant lighting.

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.