If you outfit your buildings with fluorescent, HID, or plug-and-play linear LED lighting, you depend on a device called a ballast.
Practical advice on commercial lighting from LED retrofits to lighting design.
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Topics: Lighting 101, FAQs, Ballast, Fluorescent light
Fluorescent lighting. You probably already have an idea of what it is. Maybe you even understand a little about how it works.
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Topics: Lighting 101, Energy savings, Fluorescent light
If you had asked us a couple of months ago, we thought we would be writing about new light bulb restrictions that could potentially phase out incandescent light bulbs. New energy efficiency standards for light bulbs were set to go into effect on January 1, 2020.
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Topics: Lighting 101, FAQs, Incandescent lighting
Does reading a light bulb part number make your eyes want to cross or glaze over?
Just like languages, some light part numbers can be extremely hard to translate and understand. It doesn’t help that each manufacturer speaks a different dialect.
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Topics: Lighting 101, CRI, Fluorescent light
If you're new to commercial lighting, the concept of a ballast can be an odd one. You’re probably used to just screwing light bulbs into sockets and flipping switches. The transition to ballast-dependent lighting technology can be frustrating and confusing.
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Topics: Lighting 101, Ballast
Have you ever heard a light bulb buzz?
Technically, no. The buzzing you hear is coming from the ballast, not the bulb itself.
Nerdy lighting technicalities, I know. Ballasts, light bulbs – it's all the same, isn't it?
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Topics: Lighting 101, Ballast, Fluorescent light
As we start a new year full of new retrofit, design, and maintenance projects, we've updated our Lighting Terms Glossary to include some important terms that you'll want to be aware of this year.
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Topics: Lighting 101, Lighting maintenance, LED retrofit, Lighting as a service
When you’re ready to make the leap to LED lighting, it can be a little scary. There are a number of different terms and performance metrics that can make a simple thing feel hard.
Let me help you sort through a few of the most common specs, and offer you an easy way out!
Check out Regency's online Lighting Glossary for a more extensive list of lighting terms.
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Topics: Product Comparison, LED, Lighting 101, Wattage
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.
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Topics: Lighting 101, HID, Light bulb part numbers
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.
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Topics: Lighting 101, HID
