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

This article has been updated with new information and new products. It was originally published in 2017.

If you still have T12s in your building and they run on magnetic ballasts, you may soon face a problem: what do you do when your ballasts die? 

Well, like T12s themselves, magnetic ballasts are becoming harder and harder to find these days. They're really no longer in production in the U.S., so most people today are running T12 fluorescents on electronic ballasts. What is a ballast? Read more.

Before we get into troubleshooting options, let's briefly determine how to tell if a ballast is bad.

It's important to have an established routine for maintenance of any kind, but lighting maintenance –– especially for schools –– should be particularly efficient and consistent. Lighting maintenance headaches may be frequent, but we’ve found that having adequate knowledge and resources are key in managing those headaches.

Proper lighting is key in providing a positive tenant, guest, or shopper experience in any parking garage. In many respects, it's a first impression for the people visiting your facility and shouldn't be overlooked.

This lighting typically remains on 24/7, so it’s important to have long-life bulbs to avoid burnouts at the wrong time. Additionally, these 24/7 burn-time light fixtures present a quick payback on energy-efficient LED upgrades.

Our lighting designers answer countless questions when it comes to helping their customers understand light color and quality. Lighting Design Manager, Tori Cole, is here to help simplify some of the complexity around design, color quality, and LED lighting. Follow along as she answers some of the most common questions. 

Although LED lighting is the most popular and one of the most efficient lighting options right now, our team still faces a lot of questions on fluorescent lighting. Aletheia Cyr, our training and development specialist, helps walk through some of the most common questions we receive on fluorescent lighting. 

About 18 months ago, we announced that we would be building an orphanage in Haiti, in order to help and care for as many as 100 orphaned children in the Caribbean country. Today, there are over 80 children who call the orphanage home, but there is more work to be done.

Part of our original vision for this project was to include a "vocational training center," where the children could learn vital, tangible skills that easily translate to in-demand jobs on the island. We have begun construction on this part of the property, and on several classrooms. And now, we're looking to accelerate construction efforts by raising funds through a special, limited time partnership with our recycling vendor.

Replacement LED tubes for T12/T8/T5 bulbs have come a long way over the last couple of years. Between questions on plug-and-play versus bypass ballast to figuring out when it’s the right time to retrofit, it’s clear that linear LEDs are here to stay.

Linear fluorescent lighting has for decades been the workhorse light source for so many applications, thanks to its long life ratings and relatively efficient use of energy. But the emergence of linear LED technology over the last decade or so has really changed the landscape, making buying decisions for linear applications more complex. 

We get questions all the time about linear lighting. Is it risky to invest in LED lighting products? Are more fluorescent phaseouts ahead? What linear lighting products does Regency suggest?

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.

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.