Craig DiLouie

NEMA’s Electroindustry Business Conditions Index (EBCI) for current conditions in North America climbed to 68.2 in August from 54.5 in July. Slightly less than half of the survey panelists reported business conditions improved from July to August compared to only 9% claiming they deteriorated. The remaining 45% of panelists reported conditions were largely unchanged. The [...]

The last three months have shown steadily increasing demand for design services and the Architecture Billings Index (ABI) is now at its highest level since 2007. As a leading economic indicator of construction activity, the ABI reflects the approximate nine to twelve month lead time between architecture billings and construction spending. The American Institute of [...]

My column in the July issue of ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR describes popular landscape lighting design techniques that can be used to transform exterior spaces through illumination. Catch it here.

Skydome LED by Focal Point is a family of classic illuminated circles offering a choice of 2-, 3- and 4-ft. diameters and recessed, surface and pendant mounting. The company’s Light Right system provides up to five standard output levels in each surface mount and suspended luminaire to satisfy different application needs, with alternate levels within [...]

Don Peifer posed this question in his recent column for LD+A: Does the hype surrounding LEDs match the reality? Or put another way: Is the battle over and have LEDs already won? Read an excerpt here. LightNOW’s take: LEDs are still only a tiny fraction of the total installed base but represent a large and [...]

First, the bad news. Due to the weather-related slow start in the nonresidential building market during the first part of the year, and the prolonged weakness in the institutional sector, construction spending projections for the rest of the year have been lowered slightly. Now the good news. The commercial construction sector is still looking at [...]

The U.S. Department of Energy’s CALiPER program has released a Snapshot Report on indoor LED luminaires, which utilizes the LED Lighting Facts® program’s extensive product database to help industry stakeholders understand the current state and trajectory of the market for that class of products. Based on data through the first quarter of 2014, the report [...]

The Illuminating Engineering Society New York City Section (IESNYC) recently announced the recipients of the 2014 Lumen Awards. Ten New York City-based design firms – AKF Lighting Design, Arup, Cline Bettridge Bernstein Lighting Design, Cooley Monato Studio, Focus Lighting, Kaplan Gehring McCarroll Architectural Lighting, L’Observatoire International, PHT Lighting Design, Renfro Design Group, and Tillotson Design [...]

Here’s an interesting application for LEDs: growing food on other planets. Researchers at the University of Guelph’s Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility (CERF) are studying LEDs as a light source that can facilitate plant growth in environments where nutrients and electricity are scarce, such as space and even during colonization efforts of other planets. The [...]