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

There's a long and heated debate about the use of incandescent light bulbs. We have debunked the myth that incandescent bulbs were banned in the US, but the reality is that efficiency standards have changed the way consumers shop for lighting. 

And with changing efficiency standards come changes in product availability. 

Regardless of your stance on the political side of this issue, we still need light in our homes, offices, schools, gyms, airports – you get the idea. So, we get regular questions about where to buy incandescent light bulbs or what the best options are for converting to LED. 

We're interested in making lighting easy for our customers, so we've put together a list of the most common places you might find an incandescent bulb along with links for where you can buy either the incandescent product or a compatible LED upgrade. 

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. 

Growing up in Japan, I learned quite a bit about the challenges that come with learning a second language. I remember having both English-speaking and Japanese-speaking friends and being the translator between the two groups. And I had to work hard to make sure information didn't get lost in translation. 

Oftentimes, there were tricky moments for me, as the translator. Like, when my English-speaking friends would tell a joke while smiling, that smile was perceived as nervousness by my Japanese friends. The cultures were so different, each having so many nuances, that most communications had challenges like that. I was constantly trying to figure out how to accurately capture the intent, the context, and proper body language from the native culture and properly translate it for the other culture.

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.

You may have heard about the light bulbs that are too hot to handle. Or perhaps you have heard them referred to as the lamps that have a bulb within bulb – similar to a dream within a dream, huh? 

These are called halogens.

How do halogen lamps emit artificial light? Where should you use halogen lamps? Where does halogen fit into the lighting industry?

Let’s answer those questions and dive into the pros and cons of halogen technology.

Think about the last time you were at a store buying a microwave or some other appliance, like a refrigerator or a dryer. The sales associate probably rattled off a bunch of the product’s features. They probably demonstrated what it could do, talked about pricing and upgrades, and leaned on their usual talking points. 

Our technologically advanced day and age has filled our lives with a bunch of equipment with functionality that most of us probably couldn’t begin to explain in any kind of detail. Sure, we can thumb around on our iPhone’s apps and show our grandmothers how Instagram and FaceTime work, but could we ever explain the device’s technological makeup? 

Preliminary findings from researchers at MIT might signal a renaissance for incandescent light bulbs. 

Just last week on this blog, in a post titled “Was there actually an incandescent light bulb ban?”, we wrote “it’s not too hysterical to prophesy of incandescent-less 2020s.” As we point out in that piece, the Energy Independence and Security Act will require incandescent lamps to be 60-70 percent more efficient in 2020 than they were in 2007, when EISA was signed into law. We suggested that those stringencies, along with recent price reductions in compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) and LEDs and the drastically longer lifetimes of those bulbs, might spell the eventual end for incandescents. 

Two years after the final phaseout of traditional 60 watt incandescent light bulbs and nearly a decade after former President George W. Bush penned what we know as EISA – the Energy Independence and Security Act – people are still wondering: “Were incandescent light bulbs actually banned?” 

That’s a good question. The answer: yes and no.

This is the third post in our series to take the mystery out of savings and payback calculations for lighting retrofits. Lighting projects are more common than ever with the efficiency, long-life and lowering cost of LEDs, and there can be a large number of factors to tally up in the savings calculations. We are helping to answer the question of how you know which ones to include.