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

Earlier this year, I was talking with a project manager for a mid-sized national restaurant chain about the challenges of getting a store properly lit (and properly dimmed). "If I open a store a year late and a million dollars over budget, as long as it looks good, I'm not worried about losing my job. But if it's Friends and Family Night and my CEO asks me to dim the lighting and it flickers, I'm worried."

Perhaps you've been in the same shoes, and you're well acquainted with the importance and difficulty of restaurant lighting.

Around this time last year, Philips Lighting and the City of Dubai jointly announced the development of "the world's most efficient light bulb," touting a new LED filament bulb that can reportedly produce up to 200 lumens per watt.

Solid State Lighting Design explained more about the lamps:

LED is an exciting technology, but completely changing the lighting in your building over to LED may not always be practical nor the best choice today. We still get a lot of questions from customers asking where in their buildings are the best places to convert to LED.

Oftentimes, the switch to energy efficient lighting takes place over a few phases. One section of the building is changed first. Then, when the energy savings from that kicks in, more money is allocated for similar projects. That's how one of our customers at a high-rise apartment building managed to retrofit every socket to top-of-the-line LED.

When making the decision to purchase a certain lighting product, are there any questions that matter more than price, availability, and timeline?

Perhaps that's the case with anything you order –– how much does it cost, is it in stock, and when am I going to get it? 

But the stakes can be pretty high when you're ordering lighting to get your building or store into shape before an executive visits or ahead of the holidays or when you're knee-deep in a national rollout schedule.

So, if you call Regency right now and purchase lighting, how long will it take to get your order?

Linear fluorescent lighting has for decades been the workhorse light source for so many applications, thanks to its long life ratings and relatively efficient use of energy. But the emergence of linear LED technology over the last decade or so has really changed the landscape, making buying decisions for linear applications more complex.

We get questions all the time about linear lighting. Is it risky to invest in LED lighting products? Are more fluorescent phaseouts ahead? What linear lighting products does Regency suggest?

If you're responsible for determining the right ambiance and light quality of your application, then you probably already know how important understanding Color Rendering Index (CRI) and Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) is.

Here's the problem: CRI and CCT are anything but easy to understand.

Properly aimed lighting is one of the most important, yet easily overlooked aspects of great retail design. Done correctly, it will accent the merchandise you want to sell and lead your customers through your store. Check out this step-by-step guide on aiming to make your store attractive to customers.

Imagine yourself ordering a medium rare, large, ribeye steak at a restaurant only to cut into it for the middle to appear orange and unappetizing. Or picture yourself at a fine dining restaurant that's so poorly lit your entire party has to take out their cell phones just to view the menu. 

Last year, we published our first-ever LED Buying Guide. We say over and over again around here that our goal is to make lighting easy for our customers, and the LED Buying Guide was published with that objective in mind.

The lighting world has undergone rapid changes over the last decade with the emergence and proliferation of light emitting diode (LED) lighting technology. Just seven years ago, in 2010, less than 10 manufacturers made up 90 percent of the lighting market. Last year, that market share was spread between more than 400 manufacturers, each with its own fluid, iterative product line.

That's a lot to keep up with.

So, how do we make things easier for you?

About a year ago, I was on a Costco run, but was turned away when I arrived. It was the middle of the day and the whole store was shut down.

Care to guess why?