Articles By This Author
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Craig DiLouie — Lighting Columnist
Craig DiLouie, a lighting industry journalist, analyst and marketing consultant, is principal of ZING Communications. He can be reached at www.zinginc.com
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Lamp Enforcement
July 2010
New York City’s dense urban landscape is populated with more than a million buildings that annually consume $15 billion in energy and generate 75 percent of the city’s carbon emissions. The 22,000 largest buildings, concentrated largely in Manhattan, account for roughly 45 percent of total floorspace and energy consumption. Lighting is a major energy user, responsible for nearly 18 percent of energy consumption and resulting carbon emissions.
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There’s an App for That
June 2010
Amalgam technology, fairly common among plug-in compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), is now available in linear T5HO, T5VHO and T8VHO fluorescent lamps, making fluorescent lighting competitive in many high-intensity discharge (HID) applications.
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Introduction to Lighting Design
May 2010
In a perfect world, a lighting manufacturer would respond to interest in one of their products by assuming the cost of installing samples in an exact mockup of the actual space being designed. Then, the manufacturer would hire people to work there for a while and conduct a postoccupancy survey on their satisfaction with the lighting.
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Knowing What’s Best
May 2010
Tight credit and weak demand for new facilities pushed private nonresidential spending into a deep slide in 2009, while public construction got a boost from federal stimulus money. Considering that more than 30 states and 130 cities encourage or require Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for public construction, many of these projects are green.
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Dim and Dimmer
April 2010
Satisfying peak demand can be very expensive for utilities, which pass this cost onto their customers in the form of time-variable pricing or demand charges. Utilities, therefore, share a common interest with their customers to reduce peak demand. This is because shaving the peak enables them to satisfy customer demand while avoiding the high cost of building new capacity or having to buy expensive power from other markets during an emergency or demand spike. Besides charging more for power used during peak demand periods, a number of utilities offer financial incentives to building owners to curtail load on request, usually during an emergency grid event.
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Lighting Design Techniques
April 2010
The presence of light is rarely noted unless there is a perceived lack of it (dim atmosphere or shadows) or a perceived excess (glare). Like air, light is invisible and yet is everywhere in the visual environment, as we cannot see without it.
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LED Quality Advocates
March 2010
“CFLs in America: Lessons Learned on the Way to Market,” published by the Department of Energy (DOE), concludes that technical and quality problems with early compact fluorescents snowballed into major obstacles to acceptance by consumers and retailers.
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Solid State of Lighting
March 2010
Some of the most dramatic lighting performance gains can be achieved by adopting solid-state lighting in the home, where incandescent lighting has met its match with products that combine the efficiency of compact fluorescent and the quality of halogen. Because of the unique characteristics of the source, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) also enable product designers to reimagine the lighting fixture in smaller, more colorful, more dynamic directions.
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Age-Old Debate: Analog or Digital?
February 2010
Digital control entails using digital communication architecture to network intelligent lighting control devices. It enables more economical integration of multiple control strategies, while being flexible and capable of generating feedback.
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Control Wiring Methods
January 2010
Control wiring is used to communicate commands and other information between control devices in a lighting system.
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Finding the Right Template: Lighting
November 2009
Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy (DOE) launched Commercial Lighting Solutions, an interactive Web tool that provides lighting templates, supported by construction documents, that can help commercial building owners achieve desirable lighting quality while improving lighting efficiency by at least 30 percent over the ASHRAE 90.1-2004 energy standard. Part of DOE’s Commercial Building Energy Alliances—private-public forums aimed at significantly reducing energy use in various vertical building markets—Commercial Lighting Solutions seeks to stimulate adoption of advanced lighting technologies and design practices by making them available to anyone who specifies lighting, such as electrical contractors, designers, owners, distributors and other industry professionals.
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Bilevel Switching
October 2009
Bilevel switching, in which alternate rows, fixtures or lamps are separately circuited and independently controlled, has been demonstrated in one study to produce 22 percent energy savings in private offices. Meanwhile, occupancy sensors, which automatically switch the lights based on occupancy, can produce up to 45 percent energy savings in private offices, according to the Advanced Lighting Guidelines.
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White LED Control
September 2009
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) predicts that solid-state lighting will achieve efficacies as high as 160 lumens per watt and provide most of our general lighting needs within the next 20 years, thereby reducing the nation’s energy costs by 6–7 percent.
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A Good Energy Story
August 2009
Between 1984 and 2003, the percentage of people directly using a computer at work more than doubled to nearly 57 percent. The widespread adoption of computers not only changed office environments but also best practices in lighting and, by extension, office lighting technology. For example, lensed troffers produced high-angle brightness and, therefore, became displaced by parabolic fixtures, which use shielding at high angles. But as is the case with many lighting devices, there is a trade-off. These fixtures reduce glare on computer screens, but because the light they emit is concentrated almost entirely downward, with very little light reaching high walls or the ceiling plane, they often are accused of producing a dim atmosphere popularly described as the “cave effect.”
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Guiding Light
July 2009
The International Code Council (ICC) develops model codes regulating construction of residential and commercial buildings, one of which is the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Most states have a commercial or residential energy code that is based on some version of the IECC.
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The Leed View: Sustainable Lighting
July 2009
In Turner Construction's 2008 Green Building Market Barometer survey of 754 commercial real estate executives, a significant percentage of respondents view green buildings as having lower operating costs and higher building values, rent requirements, occupancy rates and overall return on investment.
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Weighing In
June 2009
After the Energy Independence and Security Act became law in late 2007, threatening an end to 40–100 watt general-service incandescent lamps, a consumer backlash began building against compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). A common argument is that CFLs contain mercury, a toxic substance, whereas incandescent lamps don’t, countering the primary environmental benefit of using CFLs—significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at power plants.
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Nearly There: Screw-In LEDs
May 2009
The stakes are high. According to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates, nearly 1 billion 60W A19 lamps will be installed in the United States by 2010. America is calling for a super-efficient lamp and has pinned its hopes on solid-state lighting. Are light-emitting diode (LED) screw-in replacement lamps ready to take on that venerable workhorse: the 60W incandescent A-lamp? DOE CALiPER product testing research suggests they are not.
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Missed Opportunities
April 2009
Energy management systems (EMS) provide automatic control of electrical loads—most commonly heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and sometimes lighting. Building automation systems (BAS) include the energy management functionality of an EMS along with nonenergy-related loads, such as security and fire safety.
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What's In a Name?
April 2009
In recent years, ballast manufacturers have begun marketing a premium fluorescent ballast called a “high-efficiency ballast” for operation of 4-foot T8 lamps. A high-efficiency ballast provides the same level of light output as a standard electronic ballast but does it with 2-–5 fewer watts. For a cost adder of about 10-–20 percent, the ballast can add energy savings of up to 7 percent.
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CBD Extended to 2013
March 2009
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 created the Commercial Buildings Deduction (CBD), an incentive consisting of an accelerated tax deduction rewarding investment in energy-efficient interior lighting; heating, ventilating and air conditioning/hot water systems; and building envelope.
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Retiring the Light
February 2009
Building owners interested in entertaining a lighting upgrade proposal often are interested in an energy-saving retrofit, but they may actually need a redesign that saves energy and improves lighting quality.
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Safeguarding Against Shattering
January 2009
Metal halide lamps occasionally fail "non-passively" at end of life, which may cause hot quartz elements to be ejected from the light fixture, presenting a fire risk.
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Can LEDs Take on T8?
December 2008
There currently is a push to replace linear fluorescent T8 and T12 lamps with linear light-emitting diode (LED) replacement lamps, but are LEDs ready to take on this workhorse in general lighting? The evidence suggests no, not yet anyway, except perhaps in some specialty applications, such as refrigerated display cases.
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Lighting Controls for Code Compliance
December 2008
Energy codes provide a minimum standard for new construction of commercial buildings. Your local code may be a unique one developed by the state or municipality, such as California’s Title 24, or may be based on a version of ASHRAE 90.1 (1999, 2001, 2004, 2007) or the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) (2001, 2003, 2006) standards. While the country is regulated by a patchwork of codes, all codes must be at least as stringent as ASHRAE 90.1-1999, the national energy standard.
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A New Technology in a Familiar Package
November 2008
In recent years, the lighting market has seen new general lighting products, introduced for niche applications, become mainstream. As a result, it is increasingly important for electrical contractors to understand the basics of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to successfully work with this rapidly growing lighting technology.
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Pass the Torch
November 2008
Incandescent reflector lamps. fluorescent magnetic, mercury vapor and probe-start metal halide ballasts—they’ve had a good run, but now it’s time to gracefully retire them. Their competitors are simply too efficient.
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Control Freaks
October 2008
Housing starts in 2007 had declined by more than one-third from their 2005 peak, but the market for home technologies remains strong, according to the Sixth Annual State of the Builder Technology Market study conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association.
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How Low Can You Go?
September 2008
In 1972, the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) recommended a light level of 70 foot-candles (fc) for typical tasks in open offices, which was typically provided by magnetic-ballasted F40T12 2-by-4 troffers, creating a lighting power density (LPD) as high as 5.5W per square foot. By 1990, IESNA had refined its recommendation to 15–50 fc. LPD was reduced to about 1.5W per square foot.
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Living up to the Legend
September 2008
Here’s a light source with the potential to reduce the nation’s energy costs by 6–7 percent, to reimagine the light fixture as a highly compact and dynamic element, to keep 2 to 4 tons of mercury out of landfills and incinerators each year, and to give building owners lighting that doesn’t require lamp replacement for up to a decade or longer.
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Teach Me How
August 2008
Enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools rose 24 percent between 1985 and 2006, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 2006, nearly 50 million students were using more than 385,000 school buildings.
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Can Lighting Deliver?
July 2008
Electrical contractors don't like to brag, but they are enjoying a -significant and growing influence in lighting decisions. According to a Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance study, contractors make design changes or suggestions in roughly one-third of their projects, either by substitution or original specification, and more than one-half provide lighting design and layout services, particularly in small- and medium-sized projects. (Compare those numbers to those in the profile on page 36, and you’ll get a compelling picture of contractor influence.)
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Standing by for Standards
June 2008
ASHRAE STANDARD 90.1 Energy-Efficient Design of New Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings establishes minimum standards for designing energy-efficient buildings. In January, ASHRAE released 90.1-2007, and states could begin the process of adopting it, verbatim or amended, as their energy code.
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Is the Bulb Being Banned
May 2008
The Energy Independence And Security Act of 2007 created higher efficiency standards targeting today’s 40–100W incandescent and halogen general-service lamps.
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Staying on Schedule
April 2008
Lighting maintenance can play a part in a lighting upgrade project in three ways. First, proper maintenance can increase average light levels, potentially increasing energy savings in a retrofit. Second, it ensures the new lamps continue to be installed over time without “snap back”—accidental reversion back to the old lamp type that fits the same socket. And third, proper equipment selection can result in energy savings and easier maintenance for the customer.
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Showdown on Level Ground
March 2008
After Jeff McCullough's talk at Intertech’s LEDs October 2007 conference, an audience member declared that McCullough’s employer, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is “taming the Wild West” and suggested that he wear a cowboy hat.
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Watching Closely
February 2008
Hindering adoption of advanced lighting control strategies is the idea of whether these strategies work together in combination as advertised to produce consistent energy savings and worker satisfaction, thereby justifying a higher initial cost.
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The Illumination Debate
January 2008
High-bay applications—such as factories, warehouses, big box stores and gyms—continue to be the hottest lighting retrofit markets. Switching from probe-start metal halide to fluorescent fixtures can generate up to 50 percent energy cost savings, while providing other advantages of fluorescent lighting, such as instant-on and restrike (making additional savings with lighting controls possible), improved color qualities, and emergency reballasting options. High-bay fluorescent fixtures are available from a range of manufacturers, such as Cooper, Day-Brite, Holophane, Hubbell, Lithonia, Orion, Ruud and others. Most manufacturers offer T5HO or T8 lamping options, which is a key area for decision makers.