|
Hot-button Technical Issues
The technical session at this year's ALA Annual Conference was titled "Residential Lighting Products - The Top Five Hot-button Technical Issues." The idea was to figure out what critical technical issues must be considered and managed if products are to be successfully designed and sold in today's fast-changing market. I invited three members of our ALA Engineering Committee to contribute to the discussion - Carl Bloomfield, global lighting business director for Intertek; Mike O'Boyle, senior manager of R&D at Philips Lighting; and David Shiller, president of Lighting Solution Development. Each panel member, including me, put together our top five hot-button list.
Click here to see the lists presented at the ALA Conference seminar in Huntington Beach, Calif.
There was some topic overlap between the panel members, but it was interesting to see how our thoughts diverged as well. Together, the four of us represent over 100 years of lighting industry experience in product, marketing, application, technology, standards and testing work.
So, what are the top issues? Here's my summary with a few comments, including some audience input.
Technical Issues Summary
Expanding Product Regulations
Lighting products are being impacted globally by regulatory activity, which extends well beyond the familiar energy efficiency and fire/electrical safety testing. Performance characteristics, such as flicker and color are being mandated, the results of toxicity testing of fixture materials must be reported and special state labeling of products and packaging may be required. In a few areas, product disposal at the end of life is controlled. The standards can be newly written or adopted from others. Canada, for example, often adopts IEC standards from Europe, sometimes with Canadian exceptions, but NRCan also recently announced an effort to adopt U.S. DOE lighting product standards and test procedures - more than 20 are already on their working list. So, while there is some harmonization activity, there are very few truly global standards. A part of this regulatory change is the growing mandate to have testing and certification done by a third party, which adds time and costs.
Safety Testing
Traditional safety certification testing is changing as the chances of fire or heat problems involving high-temperature bulbs and fixtures are reduced due to the shift from incandescent lighting products to CFL and LED products. Safety standards based upon hazard analyses and fixture systems that permit the fixture to operate in a "fault mode" while reporting an operational problem are being developed. The goal is to develop new standards that will require less testing, permit self-testing and will be less complicated.
Which System?
Lighting is increasingly thought of as a system rather than an individual fixture or component. Decisions about connected lighting products involving "compatibility, interchangeability and interoperability" will have to be addressed carefully by manufacturers and retailers to take advantage of this trend, because there are several competing protocol standards and alliances. The new ANSI/NEMA C-137 Lighting Systems Committee is involved in this work and the ALA is well represented on the committee. As a side note, this committee is also dealing with issues of cyber security, which is crucial since systems may gather and report lighting operating times, control settings, location and energy use.
Light and Health
Research accumulated, especially in the last 20 years, shows a clear link between light and human health. While the relationship between electric lighting and productivity, especially visual performance, is fairly well understood, there may also be ways to use light to affect and tailor human behavior. This is being called "human-centric lighting." How to apply this knowledge to the design and use of residential lighting products, the panel agreed, has to be reviewed with care. An important application where ALA might provide leadership is lighting for the elderly, where research shows that simple changes in lighting can have significant, positive health-changing and behavior-changing effects on populations sometimes confined to residential spaces.
Applying New Light Source Technologies
OLEDS, laser diode light sources, quantum dot and yellow silicate phosphors are part of the changing pattern of light source options that have to be carefully evaluated with respect to their proper application to keep up with the market. There was agreement by the panel that this is a major issues for manufacturers due to rapid changes that dictate short and hectic product cycles. It's been made more important because of recent decisions by Energy Star and the California Energy Commission to qualify the use of standard screw-base LED and CFL products so that manufacturers can simply use integral bulb products instead of investing in new light source and light engine configurations and technology. The panelists and many in the audience agreed that, because of the financial investments and business implications, this issue is often the top hot-button issue in their planning.
Many thanks to the panelists and to the large audience of more than 150 people who gave high marks to this session.
I appreciate your suggestions and comments about ways in which our ALA technical resources can help you and your business.
Sincerely,
Terry McGowan, FIES, LC
Director of Engineering & Technology
|
