Electical Contractor

Fires take the lives of thousands of people each year. In 1998 and 1999 alone, 4,035 and 3,570 civilian fire deaths occurred in the United States.

For decades, lighting designers, specifiers, contractors, and distributors regarded halogen lamps as best-suited for outdoor applications or as accent and display lighting. Their bright, striated light caused “sparkle,” but was far too harsh for general lighting purposes.

While cause and effect drives science, cost and effect is increasing what drives specifying for outdoor lighting.

Electrical contractors, rather than architects, engineers, or lighting consultants, are often asked to design/build lighting in commercial, institutional, residential, and industrial structures.

With great interior design, less is often more. Smaller is often better than bigger. Designers and end-users want lighting fixtures that are diminutive and unobtrusive, but they do not want to sacrifice the strength or efficiency of lighting sources.

Before the last week of October 1999 most people in Memphis, Tenn., were oblivious to the state-of-the-art baseball facility going up downtown. The new home of St. Louis Cardinals' AAA-affiliate, the Memphis Redbirds, was just another downtown project that would cause traffic jams, they thought.

Security is a hot topic, thanks to the burst of millennium warnings. And, it's a hot opportunity to sell security lighting products. The turn of the century brought security discussions to television and newspaper front pages.

"The last great mystery"--that is what one contractor called the game of managing lighting materials for the average new construction project.

If you are involved in design/build lighting projects, from layout to specification, using manufacturer-provided or third-party lighting design and layout software can make your row a little easier to hoe.