November 2012

Another amazing project from the folks at Focus Lighting … As the entry piece at the Boffo Show House, Focus Lighting’s interactive installation – “Cloud” – unifies the four Show House experiences by ushering guests in with a veil of ever-changing color overhead. The LED nodes illuminating the 200 tubes and uplighting the ceiling above [...]

Outstanding Women in Business were honored from across the State of Colorado during the 14th Annual Denver Business Journal event earlier in 2012. Colorado Lighting Inc. Chief Executive Officer Norma Frank took top honors in the Large Business Owner category. A Colorado native, Frank established her family business in 1977. At the time, the lighting [...]

Soraa recently announced that as of November 1, the company’s full spectrum GaN on GaNTM LED MR16 lamps became available through Ushio group companies and its subsidiaries in Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Europe. Ushio, the largest distributor of MR16 lamps in Japan, is selling Soraa’s LED MR16 lamps under the [...]

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) recently announced the opening of the fifth public comment period for the proposed update to its LEED green building program. The comment period, which will close on December 10, enables the building community to view the most recent draft of the rating systems and provide comments where any substantive [...]

The Quality LED Floodlighting (QLF) Series features a simple, geometric architectural design that complements the company’s Quality LED Area & Site and Wall Mount product families. Optical distributions range from a tight spot to a wide architectural flood, making the luminaire well suited for a wide range of applications such as accent, landscape, facade, wall [...]

Philips Lighting will host a webinar on Tuesday, November 27, 2012 on the topic of the sports lighting. Mike Simpson, technical director at Philips, will talk about design lessons and insights taken from the process of lighting the 2012 Olympic Games in London. He’ll explain how working closely with broadcasters enabled television pictures of the [...]

A bill introduced into the Senate, the Commercial Buildings Modernization Act (S.3591), seeks to extend the Commercial Buildings Tax Deduction (179D) created by the Energy Policy Act to the end of 2016, make it easier for taxpayers to claim the deductions, and offer higher maximum deduction levels, as the current tax deduction is set to [...]

Billings at architecture firms in September increased at their fastest pace since late 2010. As a leading economic indicator of construction activity, the Architecture Billings Index (ABI), maintained by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), reflects the approximate 9- to 12-month lag time between architecture billings and construction spending. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) [...]

Is it possible that some T5 lighting fixtures are perfectly efficient? One might get that idea based on some efficiency ratings of 98–100 percent, although it might not seem possible. Such a rating must be a mistake, right? But it’s not. Check out this article I wrote for ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR about how T5 fixtures are [...]