RESIDENTIAL
a big problem. Our solutions were endlessly upgradeable and maintainable. When I started my lighting career a couple of decades ago, I installed a few MR16 fixtures on my parents’ porch. They still work today, and I can still find replacement parts today.
Photography by Brady King. A modern kitchen with indiscriminate general lighting that hurts our eyes and leaves counters dim.
we change jobs, grow families, switch neighborhoods, and relocate. Yet, there may be a difference between residential change and commercial change. When a house changes hands, it rarely will see a change in its lighting. At home we expect lighting to last for fifty years, far longer than it might in a commercial setting. There is lighting in my current house that was installed before the previous owner, and locations have mostly stayed the same for a century. Unfortunately, this continuity and reliability is threatened by our current market approach.
A BETAMAX REALITY? I can almost see the Sony executives cringe when their defunct Betamax video tapes are rolled out yet again as an analogy for outdated, legacy technologies. Many of you may have to google Betamax just to find out why these arguably higher-quality video tapes were swept under the rug of history by the humble VHS tape. Fill in your own more timely analogy, but this is simply a story of proprietary technology versus a more easily accessible standard. In residential lighting, every onboard LED recessed light is another Betamax tape, something manufactured and provided by a single company. Every 6” recessed can from the 1980s is a VHS tape, widely available and easy to replace or repair. Yesterday was easy. Every fixture took a bulb (yes, I know I mean lamp, but, in residential lighting, we call them what our clients call them – bulbs), and every bulb could be sourced from multiple manufacturers. If I bought an MR16 downlight from one company, I could buy a bulb from another. If the maker of my light fixture went out of business, it was not a big problem. If a bulb manufacturer went out of business, it was not
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designing lighting
Yet if I choose to specify a cutting-edge LED recessed downlight for my parents’ porch today, there is a high likelihood that I will not be able to get a replacement module for that fixture in twenty or thirty years when it fails. I convinced myself this was an acceptable reality because, in twenty years, there would be something so much better that I would happily rip out the fixture and put in something new. I am no longer convinced that this is the only way.
TIME FOR CHANGE This article is the second in a series that I am writing with a singular goal of inspiring change. You can see why I think change is needed. Homeowners are forced to buy proprietary technology that will be outdated tomorrow and potentially irreplaceable at the end of its usable life. This is, quite simply, wasteful – and will add considerable waste to our landfills in the very near future. But are we really ready for change in residential lighting? There has been change already – most homes are built with the cleverly named “canless recessed lights” that are really just compact, surface-mounted glare bombs that work well in closets and garages but are found in kitchens and bedrooms and too many other locations. This is not change for the better, though it may reduce the overall power consumption of a home, as it leaves our homes less comfortable and our bodies more disrupted. Here is a radical thought that only occurred to me as I prepared to write this article: the LED industry may be ready to graduate from college and start a career. In LED’s infancy and primary school years, rapid innovation and improvement resulted in constantly changing products. First, we specified CRI 80+ fixtures in homes. Then we hit 85. Then we moved to CRI 90. Now, we’re pushing 95+ CRI and moving into TM-30 readings. When LEDs were in high school and college, generations of fixtures were measured in months instead of years or decades. Drivers steadily improved, and dimming dropped from ten percent to five and then to one