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

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?

Are you currently retrofitting to LEDs and left with some old lamps? Do you just pile them up in the back of your building?

Hopefully not.

As we move forward in the ever-changing world of lighting, staying educated and sensitive to the environmental impact of energy consumption and use of lighting has been more important than ever before. When you purchase lighting, you may not just be thinking about replacing the lamp that is in the socket, but also thinking about how the new product will impact energy, as well as the environment.

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?

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.

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:

As the world clambers to make sense of the recent emergence of LED lighting, a handful of takeaway points have cropped up as the defining traits of the technology.

And alone atop that list of traits is this one: energy efficiency.

If you were to play a game of word association with a handful of your colleagues right now, asking them for the first idea that comes to mind when you say “LED lighting,” odds are they will spout out something about energy efficiency.

Why wouldn’t they? Energy efficiency is certainly the defining characteristic of LED.

T12 fluorescent tubes are hard to come by these days, but that's not to say they've disappeared entirely.

The tubes began to be phased out in mid-2012, which we wrote about at length in our post, "The phase out of T12s: Everything you need to know about discontinued tubes."

But if you still have T12s in your sockets and you're looking to save money on lighting in 2017, there are number of ways to go about retrofitting to LED, or a more efficient fluorescent option.

In January, the most recent update of Title 24 will go into effect. Since these standards were drafted in 2016, they are referred to as the 2016 standards, which can be confusing, since they actually go into effect in 2017.

The changes may end up being pretty important to a lot of our California customers, especially those eyeing retrofit projects on the horizon.

There's a lot of confusion surrounding California's Energy Code, commonly known as Title 24. Just what is it and what kind of effect will it have on your lighting?

As you'd see published in Section 6 of the California Code of Regulations, Title 24 is a broad set of requirements for “energy conservation, green design, construction and maintenance, fire and life safety, and accessibility” that apply to the “structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems” in a building. The code applies to all buildings in California, not just state-owned buildings.

In recent years, legislatures outside of California have begun to put similar sets of code into place in their respective areas, especially when it comes to lighting.