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

When is the right time to retrofit your HID lighting to LED? It can be an expensive project, and you're probably wondering if the energy savings are worth it.

HID (or high intensity discharge) replacement bulbs aren't the cheapest. Plus, because of their high light output, they're usually in hard-to-reach areas like stadiums, gyms, warehouses, and parking lots or garages. Even changing a light bulb can mean extra costs.

Hopefully you haven’t experienced this scenario. You buy a new TV. You plug it in. Then a thunderstorm hits, lightning strikes, and zap! There goes your new TV.

You're probably thinking, if only I had plugged the TV into a surge protector.

According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the most common general industry accidents are slips, trips, and falls. Having proper lighting is one of the easiest ways to reduce the risk of these types of accidents. When choosing lighting for your warehouse, remember that it needs to be able to achieve two things: enhance safety and increase productivity.

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.

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.

We teach HID part numbers on Fridays in our School of Lighting program, and that's fitting because they're pretty easy, relative to fluorescents and incandescents.

After new employees spend hours trying to memorize chart after chart for incandescent and fluorescent part numbers, HIDs feel like a gift. 

And if you've been tracking with our part numbers series so far, you might feel the same way, now that we've arrived at HIDs. 

The University of Texas at Dallas faced a number of problems with the metal halides it was using to light its Activity Center. If you've used high intensity discharge (HID) lighting before, you can probably empathize with their troubles. The challenges the university was facing with its HID lighting system are commonplace – the very ones you'd expect with HID.

Click here to see how we helped make UT Dallas' lighting easier

Sometimes, customers hear the word "retrofit" and run. They want no part in another huge project and understandably so – they've got enough going on with other upgrade projects around their building.

But if a retrofit ends up anything like what we helped the Franklin Templeton Investments (FTI) building in San Mateo, California to achieve in its two parking garages, there's nothing to fear.

When I first started working at Regency, I knew little about lighting. I knew what an incandescent light bulb was and who Thomas Edison was. I knew that the lighting that came in tubes was fluorescent. And I knew that LEDs were becoming a thing. Beyond that, pretty much nada.

So needless to say, when I was in lighting training and first heard about high intensity discharge (HID) lighting technology, I had no real framework for what that was or where it was used. It just sounded foreign. And, well, intense.