15 Ways to Improve Lighting Quality In Commercial Applications
These 15 tips are designed to help you preserve or improve lighting quality in commercial applications, courtesy of NEMA.
- Increase luminous comfort by distributing light on walls and ceilings
- Specify a Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating of >80 when color rendering is important, along with “white” light sources between 3000 and 4100K in color temperature
- Consider lower and/or translucent partitions for open plan offices
- Choose an 80% reflectance for ceiling finishes and a 70% reflectance for walls and vertical partitions. For indirect lighting and daylighting, use a 90% ceiling reflectance.
- Specify lighting systems (lamp-ballast combinations) that provide a minimum maintained efficacy of 90 lumens/watt
- Utilize occupancy sensors to ensure that unused lighting is shut off
- Consider high-efficiency fluorescent electronic ballasts
- Reduce power with a combination of high-lumen “Super T8” lamps and low-output ballasts or reduce fixture count with standard or high-output ballasts
- Consider low-wattage ceramic metal halide lamps as an alternative to tungsten halogen lamps, and pulse-start metal halide instead of probe-start metal halide
- Reduce lamps or number of fixtures in some indirect lighting applications with one T5HO lamp instead of two T8 lamps, or otherwise increase the fixture spacing
- Use only electronic ballasts for linear fluorescent, compact fluorescent and metal halide lamps
- Consider compact fluorescent or low-wattage metal halide instead of incandescent lamps when feasible
- Layer the lighting design where practical so that the general lighting system does not do the heavy lifting of task lighting
- Minimize maintenance by choosing lamps with maximum service life
- Choose light fixtures that offer the highest optical efficiency
