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

If you're responsible for maintaining a business or commercial building, this can be a very uncertain time. COVID-19 has changed the way all of us operate. Your building may either be closed, reopening, or overrun with people. Regardless, there is one thing that's top of mind: the health of everyone who uses your building.

Our team handles thousands of lighting projects every year, and a common question we get is whether a customer should go all-in with a single manufacturer or diversify their lighting across multiple manufacturers.

Most of the time an LED upgrade involves unscrewing old light bulbs and screwing in new, energy-saving options in their place. Shocker. But if you’re looking to truly optimize your lighting for the greatest efficiency, this may not be the best approach. And it might cost you more money. 

If you’ve been considering LED lighting over the last few years, you’ve probably been approached by at least a few different manufacturers touting the superiority of their products. You’ve probably also noticed the explosion of new vendors and products on the market. It’s enough to make your head spin.

But some big questions still loom over the LED decision-making process. How do you commit to a product and avoid the anxiety that something better is going to come out in two months? How do you weed through the onslaught of new technologies, vendors, and options in the lighting industry?

If you’re looking to convert your linear fluorescent lamps to linear LED lamps, there are now more options and additional risks to consider.

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 easier 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. 

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. 

One of our lighting specialists was recently working with a chief engineer at a commercial office who was scrambling to get a suite ready for a new tenant. The process was pretty typical, and the tenant was putting a share of their improvement funds toward lighting upgrades. 

But, as always with construction and remodeling, a problem surfaced: the lighting fixtures that the tenant's architect specified had a 6-8 week lead time, but the tenant was expecting to occupy the space in 4 weeks.

The chief engineer was caught in a pickle, and the manufacturer's rep the architect worked with on the spec had no similar alternatives to offer.

Earlier this year, the Department of Energy published a report on LED failure that, among other things, found the lifetime claims for more than half of LED products to be inaccurate, or miscalculated.

Why is there so much bad information out there? Are manufacturers just fudging their claims, or are there other pieces to the puzzle?

Well, though we frequently stress the importance of vetting manufacturers, and manufacturer reps, a lot of this bad information just comes down to the industry adjusting to a new, still emerging and evolving lighting technology. That said, we're not here to make excuses for misleading or inaccurate lifetime claims. We're here to make the technicalities behind these inaccuracies understandable, so that you can effectively avoid the risk of getting left high-and-dry with early failures or poor light quality from LEDs.

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "LED lighting"? If you're like most people, you probably think of long life ratings or extreme energy efficiency.

But the excitement around LED has actually caused some confusion in many circles. Claims that some products will last seven years or more, for example, make things pretty muddy, especially when those same products fail at the three-year mark.

In fact, the primary frustration I hear from my customers is related to this very topic.