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

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

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.