Electrical Industry Articles and Stories

If you grew up like I did, in a home where thriftiness was highly valued, you likely heard the phrase “Turn off those lights!” on a regular basis. Leaving lights on in empty rooms was seen as a sign of laziness and wastefulness. Over the past decade, a number of energy codes have picked up on this message, with mandates for sensing and controls to help reduce electricity use and the greenhouse gas emissions that might be related to its production.

I’m currently in the process of planning a kitchen remodeling project and learning even more about LED lighting in the process. For example, one of the electricians looking over the room for an estimate noted that his company pretty much only works with dedicated LED downlights, now – in other words, fixtures that work with embedded LEDs, rather than more generic units that would work with LED bulbs – or any other kind of bulb, for that matter.

There’s a lot of electrical work that goes on in our ceilings. Light fixtures, fans, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors – all of these devices often find a home above our heads. The trick for electrical contractors can lie in how to mount these products, given the broad array of ceiling conditions they can encounter.

Lighting impacts virtually every aspect of a building, and as a result, contractors are always looking for solutions that make lighting control easier to estimate, faster to install, and more profitable.

Off-grid lighting products were once restricted to truly off-grid locations. Old-school lead-acid batteries needed regular maintenance and the added costs made these fixtures only practical where wiring simply wasn’t possible, in applications like remote cell towers or other such locations. That’s changing quickly, though. New all-in-one options combine high-efficiency LED fixtures with attached solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, creating affordable new possibilities for wires-free area lighting installations, even in dense urban locations.

As someone who’s been writing about LED lighting for almost a decade, I’ve gotten used to the terms “color temperature” and “light output,” and I now have a reasonably good idea about what to look for when shopping for my own lamps (aka, “bulbs”) and fixtures. But I still, on occasion, either realize I’ve chose the wrong lamp for a fixture or wish I could move between two color temperatures with the same luminaire.