Duralec Blog

When choosing lights for a job that needs high quality products and guaranteed results, it helps to start on the right foot. The right manufacturer can be hard to find. Ideally, you would choose a spec-grade manufacturer with decades of experience and a huge inventory of cutting-edge products. Fortunately, that manufacturer exists in Cooper Lighting Solutions.

Duralec is proud to offer Cooper Lighting Solutions products and to spread the word about their LED lights and first-class service. They’re an amazing example of a spec-grade manufacturer working at the top of the field. Their offerings can be a bit overwhelming (in a good way), so let’s take a quick look at a few of their top products and how they set themselves apart.

HALO Lighting

Cooper Lighting Solutions has over twenty well-known brands, like AtLite, Lumark, and Trellix. One of their brands is constantly mentioned as a leader in downlights—HALO. In fact, HALO has been named Builder Magazine’s #1 Lighting Brand for 24 years in a row. Their products include downlights, track lights, under-cabinet fixtures, outdoor lights, and more.

HALO downlights meet the highest industry standards and are suitable for every lighting need. They come in a wide variety, including recessed canless downlights, surface-mounted downlights, and countless more. Most models offer options for different sizes, wattages, trim finishes, and functions. In short, there is a light out there for every application.

HALO lights are certified by multiple organizations. This ensures top quality, reliability, efficiency, and safety. For example, the popular HALO HLBC4 Series Ultra-Slim Regressed LED Downlight is ENERGY STAR® Certified, IECC code compliant, UL Certified, T24 certified, and RoHS Compliant. These are obviously top-quality lights.

The best LED modules and drivers give HALO lights an unrivaled edge. Color rendering indexes (CRI) of 90+ guarantee exceptional light quality. Selectable color corrected temperatures (CCT) and lumen outputs make the fixtures flexible for any situation. A conference room that needs cool white light and a lounge that needs comfortable warm light could feasibly use the same fixture. Many lights are dimmable down to 5% and are of course flicker-free.

HALO lights offer exceptional efficiency, as well, even for LED lights. These fixtures use a fraction of the electricity of older lights. These numbers represent huge savings in energy bills, especially in times of energy price spikes.

Lights like the HALO HLBC4 offer five-year warranties, though it’s likely these lights will last much, much longer. The lifespans of these LED lights are well known for being exceedingly long.

Exit and Emergency Lighting

Cooper Lighting Solutions leads the industry in exit and emergency lighting solutions, as well. Through their brands AtLight and Sure-Lites, they offer comprehensive solutions for both of these needs.

Proper exit and emergency lighting isn’t just a safety issue—it’s a legal issue, as well. Federal laws (as well as some state laws) require workplaces and many other buildings to have functional exit and egress lighting in case of emergencies. Choosing compliant lights and placing them correctly is an important part of finishing a building. Cooper Lighting Solutions offers not only a wide array of lights to fulfill these needs but also the expertise to walk you through your situation, if you need.

Exit lights like those made by Sure-Lites are high-quality LEDs with nickel cadmium batteries for at least 90 minutes of emergency run time. They come with universal mounts so they can be installed in any location. Their low wattage—around 3 watts—sip electricity while providing essential exit light.

Emergency lights by Sure-Lites are also top-of-the-line LEDs that have battery backups with run times of at least 90 minutes. Lights like the Sure-Lites APELMINI are UL 924 listed and produce powerful light to meet legal egress-light requirements. These emergency lights are made to survive wet locations, extreme temperatures, and harsh conditions.

Exterior Lighting

Cooper Lighting Solutions offers nearly every exterior lighting solution imaginable. (If you have a need you’re not sure they can meet, it would be wise to check with them just in case.) They have decades of experience manufacturing floodlights, street lamps, landscape lighting, sports arena lighting, and more.

Floodlights like the GFLD Galleon II (made by the McGraw-Edison brand) produce lumens from 1,261 to 36,393 lm. They are available in a range of color corrected temperatures (CCT). These floodlights are IP66 rated to endure wet and extreme weather. They also offer a wide variety of mounting options (pole, slipfitter, yoke, trunnion, wall, and knuckle), giving you the option to use them in any application, from a parking lot to a loading dock to a tennis court.

A large catalog of outdoor architectural and decorative lighting gives designers many new options. These fixtures were designed with aesthetics in mind and can work in any style, from traditional to modern. Functional and attractive lighting is key to maintaining great pedestrian spaces.

Fixtures like the Arbor Post Top Light provide a highly modern, sculptural shape while delivering powerful, high-quality LED light. Traditional designs, on the other hand, like the New Haven or the Traditionaire fixtures, are suitable for historic districts or places looking for some old-fashioned charm. These lights come with LED drivers and other components guaranteed to survive even the harshest elements. They produce bright light at just the right CCT and just the right diffusion angles.

Cooper Lighting Solutions produces many garage and canopy lighting solutions, as well. These fixtures produce bright light that isn’t just about visibility—it’s about safety. Well lit spaces are crucial for maintaining public safety. Property protection is an added bonus to great lighting.

Garage and canopy lights come in many shapes and sizes. Some resemble street lamps while others look like floodlights. They produce a variety of light, as well—the Caretaker light produces as few as 4,500 lumens, while the Galleon puts out up to 80,000 lumens. These lights are as efficient as they are bright. Most produce between 130 and 160 lumens per watt (LPW). A good array of garage lights combines maximum coverage and energy savings, and lights from brands like Lumark and McGraw-Edison can do that.

These examples only scratch the surface of what Cooper Lighting Solutions has to offer. If you would like to explore the high-quality products of one of today’s best spec-grade manufacturers, feel free to call a Duralec expert today.

The marketplace for indoor commercial lighting has never been so good. New products seem to appear almost every day, and they’re getting better and better. The only challenge is deciding among so many options. It’s a good time to review the offerings and try to decode some of the new technology.

Indoor commercial lighting includes applications like retail, offices, and warehouses. (One could even argue that institutional spaces like schools, libraries, and hospitals are included.) These applications ask for a lot of light fixtures. The light has to be reliable, affordable, energy efficient, powerful, high quality, easy to install, easy to maintain, and more. It’s no wonder that manufacturers have been pouring major resources into developing new products in recent years.

Flat Panel LED Lights

Perhaps the most popular indoor commercial light fixture is the flat-panel LED light. These flush-mounted (usually) lights are spread across ceilings of offices and stores around the world. They have proven to be a reliable light fixture for these applications, but early versions earned a bad reputation as flickery and unattractive. Fortunately, today’s flat-panel lights are infinitely better.

Today’s fixtures are flicker-free and produce bright light that is evenly distributed across the entire lens of the fixture. They can also be tuned to whatever color temperature and brightness you need.

If an office break room or a hospital waiting room needs warmer, softer light, new fixtures can do it. If a conference room or a commercial kitchen needs powerful white light, that’s possible, too. Often, the same fixture can meet all of these needs.

Flat-panel LED lights are more flexible than you might think. This is especially true of newer models. These flat-panels are not limited to dropped ceilings. Cable-suspended flat-panel lights can create a modern look in a store or a loft office space. These fixtures can also be fitted with advanced lighting controls (ALC), also called “smart light controls” or “networked lighting controls.” These devices provide even more flexibility in how a space is lit throughout the day. An ALC device lets the user program a fixture (or array of fixtures) to follow a schedule or adjust automatically to factors like incoming natural light.

The long-term cost savings of an LED flat-panel light, especially one outfitted with advanced lighting controls, are immense. LED lights operate with a fraction of the electricity used by previous technologies—sometimes up to 80% less energy. When used in a commercial setting—i.e., when scaled up across a huge store or an entire office building—LED lights provide a multiplier effect for these savings.

LED Troffer Lights

Another popular light for indoor commercial spaces is the troffer light. (The word “troffer” is a portmanteau word that combines “trough” and “coffer.”) This fixture has roughly the same shape as a flat-panel, but its light bulbs or diodes are arranged along a central trough. The fixture’s light is projected upward, bounces against a white panel, and is reflected downward. These fixtures come in similar dimensions to flat-panel lights, like 2x2 feet, 2x4 feet, and so on.

Troffer lights are a good fit for offices, hallways, and other indoor spaces. They offer a different look than flat-panel lights but deliver a very similar quality of light.

Today’s LED troffer lights are powerful and adjustable. Many offer selectable color-corrected temperature, which means you can have warm light, cool light, or anything in between. Today’s troffer lights guarantee higher quality light than office lights from the past. For example, troffer lights from Duralec have a high color rendering index (CRI) of 80+. This index is a measure of the light’s quality and how well the light produces true colors.

LED Strip Lights—Architectural and Otherwise

Sometimes a commercial space demands a little more style from its lighting fixtures. When this is the case, an architectural strip fixture is the best fit. These lights often look like long, elegant, aluminum-clad boxes. Sometimes these boxes are suspended for added drama. Their light is cast downward at strategic angles. (The light can often shine upward, as well.) These lights bring a little more flair and sophistication than your average light.

Perfect for an upscale hotel lobby or a high-end store, an architectural strip light delivers reliable, bright LED light with style.

For example, the new Linear X light, from Luxurio, looks amazing while providing adjustable LED light in a number of color temperatures (3500K, 4000K, or 5000K) and wattages. It produces 1,300 lumens per foot and has optional dimming.

Basic LED strip lights are an effective lighting solution for indoor commercial spaces, as well. These fixtures resemble the long tubes of their older fluorescent cousins, but they have many advantages over older technologies. An LED strip light has none of the flicker of other lights and performs at a much higher level. Its light is strong and energy efficient and can often have selectable color temperatures and power levels. Glare-free lenses mean that even the most modest fixture can produce high quality light that is comfortable on the eyes.

Today’s LED strip lights offer unprecedented lifespans, as well. No longer will maintenance crews have to replace bulb after bulb. Many lights, like the Horizon Linear Industrial LED Light Strip provided by Duralec, have five-year warranties, as well as being DLC-listed and Intertek-listed. These lights produce tens of thousands of hours of light with little to no dimming.

LED High Bay Lights

High bay lights are a special kind of indoor commercial lighting. These are commonly used in spaces with high ceilings, like warehouses, gyms, big box stores, or factory floors. The newest generation of LED high bay lights is punching well above its weight class. These lights can produce tens of thousands of lumens while running on remarkably few watts—often only 100W, 200W, or 300W. For example, the most powerful IntrinsiX CIRCA Round High Bay Light produces over 43,000 lumens.

When choosing between LED high bay lights, it’s important to get it right. Many of these applications—factories and warehouses, in particular—require excellent visibility for safety reasons.

A full array of the correct light fixture can make all the difference between a facility that is safe and productive and one that is not.

Choosing energy efficient lights is important, too. High bay lights tend to run for many hours at a time—often 24 hours a day—so a highly efficient LED fixture is crucial for keeping utility bills in check. The new generation of lights is amazingly efficient. The IntrinsiX CIRCA light can produce over 140 lumens per Watt.

LED Retrofit Kits

The indoor commercial lighting world is a great place to explore opportunities for LED retrofit kits. Upgrading the lights in an office building or warehouse to LED lights can vastly improve lighting quality and energy efficiency while avoiding the cost of installing new fixtures. The savings begin the second the lights are switched on.

Retrofit kits can take advantage of the latest LED technology, no matter how old the fixtures are. Many LED lights can plug straight into an old fixture. These include LED tube lights, which resemble fluorescent tubes but are in fact filled with the latest LED lights.

Another simple plug-in option is the LED corn light (sometimes called a “corn cob” light, due to its cylindrical shape). These screw directly into E26 or E39 bases.

LED strip lighting is a quick way to replace the old lights in a troffer or flat-panel fixture. The magnetic, flexible strips snap right into the old fixture. Kits come in one, two, three, or four strips, and can produce over 10,000 lumens if needed. Installation is extremely easy on most of these retrofit kits. Easy installation and maintenance add to the huge return on investment, as well.

Exit Signs and Lights

A key component of indoor commercial lighting is having effective exit signs and egress lighting. In some cases it is even legally mandated. For example, the International Building Code (IBC) requires exit areas and passageways to have proper lighting. They even designate specific lighting power densities (LPD’s) for some of these areas (measured in watts per square foot).

The best exit signs and lights use LED fixtures that are reliable and long lasting. There is no better safety light than one that lasts for 50,000 or more hours and requires zero maintenance.

LED fixtures offer that kind of performance. They also sip energy compared to older light bulbs.

If you have any questions about indoor commercial lighting, feel free to contact an expert at Duralec, today. Duralec has an immense inventory of best-in-class LED lights for every application and experts available to talk about it.

It’s easier than ever to buy high-quality LED lights today, but judging one against another is sometimes difficult. At the very least, a buyer should be able to know if the light is safe and efficient. Luckily, there are certifications that help a buyer know this. These are stamped on the light or the packaging. However, there is a plot twist: there is more than one certification. In fact, there are many.

It's not hard for a buyer to get lost in the flood of information. The alphabet soup of certifications—DLC, ETL, UL, ETC.—promises great quality, but if you have to weigh one standard against another, it can be confusing. Eventually you have to make a decision on which light to buy.

Let’s run through the different lighting standards and see how they compare.

DLC Rating

Many LED lights come with a DLC certification. The organization behind this standard is the DesignLights Consortium. This is a non-profit organization that issues certifications for light bulbs and fixtures. The goal of this industry-led organization is to encourage the manufacture of highly performing products that are energy efficient and high-quality.

Currently, the top DLC rating is called DLC Premium. A light with this rating is certified as having the top level of the criteria above. Not only should these lights perform well—in terms of brightness, color temperature, color rendering index (CRI), and more—but they should also have long lifespans and not suffer from long-term dimming.

UL Rating

The UL rating is a must-have mark because it indicates that a light meets strict safety standards. This rating comes from a testing laboratory called UL Solutions, formerly known as Underwriters Laboratories. The white coats at this lab test products according to their own UL standards or those set by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Not only do the standards certify safety and performance, but the rating comes with quarterly “surveillance” of the product. This surveillance lets you know that the light has a long (and safe) lifespan.

The UL 1598 standard is one of the most important LED lighting standards in the industry. It lays out requirements for performance (and how to measure it), such as lumen output and color temperature. It also sets requirements to ensure the product’s safety.

“UL-Listed” is the top rating from UL Solutions, but there is a “UL-Classified” stamp, as well. This label indicates a product has been certified as a retrofit product. In other words, a UL-Classified product (say, a light bulb) is certified to replace a bulb in a UL-Listed fixture. This allows the original fixture to maintain its UL-Listed status.

ULC Rating

It’s like the UL rating, but Canadian. This rating is issued by Underwriters Laboratories of Canada, the UL’s sister organization north of the border. The ULC rating indicates that a product meets the regulations of the Standards Council of Canada. The ULC organization, in fact, has helped create and maintain hundreds of Canadian safety standards.

ETL Rating

Yet another well regarded rating regime is the ETL, formerly known as Electrical Testing Laboratories. The ETL is an independent laboratory that uses the UL rating in its testing of products. An ETL-Listed badge is a top certification for LED lights.

The ETL-Listed rating has quite the pedigree: it originated in the work of Thomas Edison. His Lamp Testing Bureau was an early laboratory for testing the safety and quality of early light bulbs—obviously the earliest light bulbs. The laboratory eventually became the Electrical Testing Laboratories. Today, this lab is part of the Intertek Company.

Intertek tests products and rates them to many different standards: UL, ULC, ASME, ASTM, ANSI, CSA, NFPA, NOM, NSF. The testing that Intertek does is similar—sometimes identical—to that called for by most of those standards.

What is an NRTL?

An NRTL is a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory. This is an independent, third-party laboratory officially recognized by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as having the ability to perform rigorous testing of products. In short, OSHA certifies who can certify things.

Intertek (ETL) is an NRTL. As is Underwriters Laboratories. But DLC is not an NRTL—it is an organization that uses third-party testing to certify lights (specifically lights, and under their own DLC badge) as efficient and high quality. (ETL and UL test and certify many different kinds of products, not just lights.)

What are regional standards?

Another family of standards is created by political entities (states, cities, etc.). These are actually statutory regulations that manufacturers must meet in order to be used in those jurisdictions. But if a product is labeled as “NYC Code Compliant” or “California Energy Commission” compliant, then that stamp carries the weight of a standard.

What does a testing laboratory actually do?

Every rating system is a little bit different, but there are many similarities between what laboratories do. Most laboratories follow a similar list of steps to inspect and test a product. In the case of testing an LED light, a laboratory would go through at least the following steps:

• Random sample of products: The lab grabs random samples from the manufacturer at an unannounced time.
• Visible inspection: The lab scrutinizes the light for any visible flaws.
• Electrical testing: The lab runs the light through a set of standard electrical tests.
• Mechanical testing: The lab shakes, drops, and generally abuses the light to test it for physical endurance.
• Environmental testing: The lab exposes the light to various conditions—heat, moisture, etc.—to test its ability to withstand environmental stresses.
• Performance testing: The lab measures the light’s output to properly quantify it. This includes lumen output, CRI, color temperature, and more.
• Label confirmation: The lab then uses its data to confirm whether or not the labeling is correct on the light.

If a lab issues its own listing, which is what ETL and UL do, it will certify the light as meeting all of the high standards it was tested against. If the lab does not issues its own listings, then it will pass along the data to whomever commissioned the product testing.