LICODA

The Illuminating Engineering Society of North America has recently added Position Statements to their listed of documents they publish.  The intent of the position statement is to issue relevant industry information quickly, until further documentation is ready.

The first position statement (PS-01-09), titled  Integrated Building Design, reflects the societies’ support of this design approach.

The second (PS-02-09), titled Use of Spectral Weighting Functions for Compliance with IES Recommendations, clarifies IES’ position regarding scotopic/photopic weighting of illuminance recommendations.

I am impressed by the Society’s desire to better react to the needs of their membership.

The US Department of Energy has developed the lighting facts program to help consumers better understand the different attributes of lighting sources.  The program has proposed a label to be added to products that explains and even illustrates the variations between the lamps.  You can find more information about the label at lighting-facts.com.

The label will provide information about output, efficacy, CRI and CCT.

I’ve found this to be a great idea and would love to see this program expand to the rest of the lighting source industry.

Last night I attended an informal lighting event focused on the Kim Lighting Warp9 area and garage luminaire.  For those of you under a lighting rock, this is an LED based area light.

Close inspection of the product (or just browsing the literature) revealed they are using small hooded arrays to direct the light in the desired direction.  Certainly and new take on area lighting.

I found the product quite to be uncomfortable to look at (up close), but I quickly remember that I have never enjoyed looking directly at the output of an area light.  I’ve seen the photometrics in action on few projects and found them to be on par with the rest of the industry (LED and HID).  Now we just have to wait for the price to drop.

A co-worker and I recently gave a talk in Las Vegas titled Pushing the LED Envelope.  The presentation covered some of the innovative ways in which LEDs are used as a light source and proposed a few new ideas and concepts.  You can view a copy of the presentation here.

Every time I enter the office I am eventually greeted by a wall of lighting catalogs.  Approximately 350 vertical square feet of shelves jam packed with binders ranging in size and color.  I believe there may have been a time when the size of a specifier’s catalog collection reflected on their stature in the industry, certainly their knowledge, and perhaps their abilities.  These days are gone.

I have often asked myself and my colleges “Why do we keep these things around?”.  The answer, quite simply, is that the online catalog has not incorporated the browsable nature of traditional catalogs - or has it.

Luminaire websites are rarely built to allow a user the ability to flip through or browse a manufacturer’s product offering without first knowing something about their products.  Or, the user may be required to traverse an array of web pages (link-click, followed by back button, repeat) just to see the goods.  Traditional hard-copy catalogs allow the specifier to view, page-turn by page-turn, the entire offering - at the time of printing.

Ah, here is the dilemma.  How does a manufacturer offer the up-to-the-minute content of a webpage with the experience of a catalog?

Perhaps the .pdf file format can solve this problem.  The simple stroke of the “page down” key is strikingly similar to a page turn.  If the file is created with a proper table of contents and/or use of built-in bookmarks, similar to tabbed page dividers, then maybe the digital catalog will replace traditional catalogs.  We can finally free up that wall space for award certificates, inspirational display boards or a new flatscreen and gaming console.

I don’t know if this is the answer to the current question running through the minds of the industry.  But, I do know for sure, I’m going to find out.

The implementation of the new 2008 version of Title 24 has been delayed from August 2009 to January 2010, according to the CEC’s website.  It seems that the rule making process took a little bit longer, forcing the delay.

The California Lighting Technology Center at UC Davis has published a residential design guide outlining requirements at they pertain to the 2005 version of Title 24.

You can download a .pdf copy of the guide here.

I found a great article in the July 2007 issue of Architectural Lighting magazine. The article is about daylight and glazing and is written by lighting icon James Benya. The author does a great job of defining and describing different type of glazing and their interaction with daylight. This is a must read if you are involved with any type of glazing specification.

The links to the article are below:

Part 1 -http://www.archlighting.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=0&articleID=554032

Part 2 -http://www.archlighting.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=0&articleID=623836

Part 3 - http://www.archlighting.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=0&articleID=626636

I had the honor of editing a textbook written by a friend of mine. The Architecture of Light, by Sage Russell, is a lighting textbook that focuses primarily on lighting design and not just the physics of light. Because of the excellent presentation of design principles, I have decided to use this text as the book for my lighting design class.

Sage has taken his experience as a lighting educator and developed a unique method of presentation for many of the topics. Specifically, the light mapping technique is a proven method of presenting lighting concepts and one I use on a regular basis.

I would not only recommend this book to students of lighting design, but I think even experienced designers will gain a new perspective of their lighting design process. I urge anyone in the lighting industry to take a look, given the opportunity- you will not be disappointed.

The truth is, from a lighting standpoint, we don’t know the truth. The lighting industry has been pleading for a set of standards to be published which allows light emitting diode (LED) sources to be compared to traditional lighting sources.

Performance data is available for LED sources, but some of the methods of measurement and the technology behind the production of light, potentially skew the analysis in favor of LED products.

Don’t get me wrong, LEDs are a great new lighting technology that raises the bar on source efficiency and allows light to be presented in unique ways. However, it pains me to see this source misrepresented as the end-all, be-all solution for lighting performance.

Most experts will agree that LEDs do have a significant lifespan. But just how significant is it. The life of a traditional light source is determined with 50% of a collective sample fails to product light (burns out). The problem with LEDs is they never really stop producing light. LEDs will continue to degrade and produce less and less light, until output is unusable. But, what constitutes unusable? I have heard reports of LEDs producing 50% of their initial output (amount light generated when first energized) after only one year of operation. These products may continue to produce light, but if at least twice the amount of product will be required for the majority of the systems life, is this being factored into the efficiency equation? Traditional lamp systems feature standardized testing to monitor the output of a lamp over it’s life cycle.

Another measure of performance for light sources is efficacy. Efficacy indicates the amount of light output (lumens) per energy unit consumed (watts) - the more lumens produced per watt, the higher the output performance of the lamp. This measure ensures we are comparing apples to apples when talking about source performance. There have been reports of LEDs having extremely high efficacies but little information about the method used to conduct the test. In some instances, these LEDs only product light for mere instant at the measured efficacy calling into question the practicality of the measurement. Once again, this exemplifies the need for standards of performance for LEDs.

Conversely, LED sources do provide for luminaire designs that tend to allow more initial lamp lumens to leave the luminaire for increased luminaire efficiency. As always, lighting specifiers should evaluate the total efficacy of the lighting system during analysis, before making any decisions.

Until standards are available, manufactures have been encouraging lighting designers to verify first hand, the performance of LED based products. Make sure you don’t get caught in the whirlwind and force your client into a solution simply because it is the hottest topic in the media. Targeted terms like “energy efficient”, “long lasting” and “high performance” can be misleading due to their vague definitions of accuracy. Be sure you know what your getting into before using these terms to establish your design criteria.