LUMIGHT BLOG POST TOPIC: CONTRACTOR’S GUIDE TO THE DLC
DLC – A Contractor’s Guide DesignLights Consortium’s (DLC) is something electrical contractors, maintenance people, and end-users hear on a daily basis. It is a certification or endorsement today’s specifiers and end-users demand their lighting products adhere to. Not only because these products have independent third-party verification of specifications but because they are usually needed to secure Lighting Rebates (Link) from various sources. Lighting product rebates offered by utilities and other organizations typically require that the product satisfy some sort of performance criteria. Testing and verification ensures that the given product performs similarly to the technology it is replacing while producing good energy savings. Often independent third party verification of data is desired. This is the function DLC serves. For solid-state lighting products like LED, rebate administrators generally rely on two quality seals of approval: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR and the DesignLights Consortium’s (DLC) Qualified Products List. According to BriteSwitch, 94% of lighting product rebate programs require that screwbase LED replacement lamps be listed with ENERGY STAR. With its primary focus on consumer lighting, ENERGY STAR does not cover many industrial/commercial product categories, however. Enter the Qualified Products List maintained by the DLC, a project of regional non-profit Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships (NEEP), an organization of utilities. The Qualified Products List provides a resource for member utilities to recognize products for their incentive programs that are tested and verified as being high-quality. Not only do many utilities within the Northeast and MidAtlantic regions rely on the Qualified Products List to recognize products but now this practice has spread across the country and even around the world.
Click here to visit the Qualified Products List online. DLC product categories and number of products listed in each category as of April 2016. Categories Outdoor Luminaires - Low Output Outdoor Luminaires - Mid Output Outdoor Luminaires - High Output Indoor Luminaires - Interior Directional Indoor Luminaires - Display Case Indoor Luminaires - Troffer Indoor Luminaires - High-Bay Outdoor Retrofit Kit - Low Output Outdoor Retrofit Kit - Mid Output Outdoor Retrofit Kit - High Output Indoor Retrofit Kit - Linear Ambient Indoor Retrofit Kit - High-Bay Indoor Luminaires - Linear Ambient Indoor Retrofit Kit - Troffer Linear Replacement Lamp - Four-Foot Linear Replacement Lamp - Two-Foot Mogul (E39) Screw-Base Replacements for HID Lamps - Low Output Mogul (E39) Screw-Base Replacements for HID Lamps - Mid Output Mogul (E39) Screw-Base Replacements for HID Lamps - High Output Mogul (E39) Screw-Base Replacements for HID Lamps - High-Bay
Total 17857 23283 26643 1183 3279 26116 23769 720 1415 1887 157 348 12387 2514 8284 2109 942 530 88 323