It's that time of year again, when we look back on lighting as so much more than just what we use for seeing, but as something that offers beauty and opens up avenues for new technologies to improve our lives. Let's take a look at lighting in the year 2016.

Just a couple years after the most common incandescent household bulbs were phased out by efficiency legislation, lovers of incandescent lighting cheered the news of technology that could make these light bulbs even more efficient than LED bulbs. Researchers at MIT developed this technology to "recycle" photons with a coating on the glass envelope of the lamp.

Early tests showed results 2-3 times more efficient than standard incandescents, which is still not as efficient as LED bulbs. This would mean replacing an old 60 watt incandescent with one using just 20 to 30 watts, while an LED can do the same job at around 9 watts. But this would be good enough to allow the new bulbs to be manufactured and sold under current legislation.

Yet the potential is for them to become far more efficient than this.

Unfortunately, if they ever do produce bulbs like this, they're probably some years off and their retail costs and rated life are unknown.

Still, there is a great affection for the warm look of incandescent bulbs, and no one seems to question their impact on human health the way they do with LEDs and especially fluorescent bulbs. (Probably because they've been around for more than 100 years.) If you had a chance to use incandescent bulbs again and they were just as efficient as LEDs and cost the same ... would you go back to light bulbs that only last about 1000 hours?

It will be interesting to see whether these bulbs become available in time.
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Electric lighting has certainly transformed the world. Lights are so common today, it's hard to think of a world where nighttime was controlled only by candles. But we love that today, light isn't just for seeing; it's frequently used to promote human health.

Enter the story of a new water filtration system designed for getting clean drinking water to communities all over the planet without the need for electricity. Using solar panels to power the system and UV LEDs to purify the water, this system can be inexpensively run, creating a job for the operator and cheap water for the community.

When you understand that children and adults alike are up long before the sun in many parts of the world, searching for water; hauling it; facing dangers along the way; and often getting polluted water in the end ... this is the kind of solution that can seriously save time and lives, allowing these communities to focus more of their energy on education and other productive activities.

Migraines are no one's best friend. They can range from inconvenient lights flashing in someone's eyes or tunnel vision to devastating headaches and nausea; from occassional problems to life altering consistency.

As any migraine suffered knows, bright lights often make a migraine worse. New research on the light factor gives some hope: researchers found that a narrow band of green light can reduce migraine pain by around 20%.

The lead researcher for this study, Professor Rami Burstein, is working on lights that only emit this band of green, as well as glasses that would filter all light outside this band of green, to help those who suffer from migraines.
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Farmers are learning more about how lighting affects the animals they raise, recognizing that animals see lights differently than we do. Specialty LED bulbs are able to adjust the lighting for different stages of the animal's life, or can mimic days and seasons. More careful use of lighting may be able to keep animals calmer and happier as they're raised while also increasing the animal's weight.
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Scientists found a better way to convert near-infrared waves into visible light. While it sounds like a promising development to make incandescent bulbs brighter without more wattage, the application is really geared more toward applications with microscopes or other instances where light needs to be projected.
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We enjoyed one man's adventures with a 20,000 watt incandescent light bulb, which you can watch in the video below. Seems like plenty of people are curious about how bright a bulb can get -- the video's had 3 million views and counting as of this writing. It's not only impressive (and no doubt extremely hot) indoors, but even lights things up substantially outdoors!
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September 14 marked the 300 year anniversary of America's oldest lighthouse, located in Boston on Little Brewster Island. Lighthouses are a great example of how light helps to save lives, even with their technology pre-dating electric lights.
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This year we had some fun for Halloween, writing a parody of Edgan Allan Poe's famous macabre poem, "The Raven." Ours is called "The T12," referencing of course a T12 fluorescent lamp. The poem is chock full of lighting references while capturing some of the psychological torment of Poe's original narrator. In our case, however, the narrator isn't tormented by some lost love, but by the fact that the lights have gone out in his home. Enjoy:
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We already spoke about UV LEDs being used in a water purification system. This article shows a new development by Russian physicists to use light in air purification. One application, according to the article, is to develop antibacterial paints.
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We've talked before about LiFi as a replacement for WiFi -- it uses light instead of radio waves to transmit data, and it's faster and more secure. Just one problem: you probably don't want to leave the lights on at all times just to transmit data.

Enter this new development called DarkLight, which is designed to let LiFi work in the dark. Effectively it would cycle lights on and off so quickly, you would never see the light. This might beg the question ... would we still subconsciously recognize it, and would it therefore still have an impact on psychology or health?

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Research from Virginia Tech suggests that milk kept in refrigerated displays using LEDs retains a good taste better than milk kept in displays using fluorescent lights. The article we've linked to suggests that riboflavin in milk oxidizes under fluorescent lights, not only affecting taste but also nutrition. Of course the effects will differ with the container the milk is kept in, but this research gives retailers one more reason to move from fluorescent lights to LEDs.
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And finally, in December of this year, Niagara Falls finally upgraded to LED lighting, which highlights the falls more beautifully while saving a great deal of money and energy over time. Stop on by the article for some beautiful images from the newly lighted falls.


And with that, we conclude our review of lighting in 2016. Did we miss some of your favorite advances in lighting? Feel free to leave a comment, and if you liked this review, remember to share it with others!

LED rope lights are a popular option for under cabinet lighting and cove lighting in homes and offices. But they're also used creatively in a number of ways for decorative lighting. We've seen them line steps on a deck or even the underside of deck railings. They're used to line outdoor walkways or landscape edging. They're used to light up roof lines or other lines of a home during the holidays. They're used to wrap trees. Indoors they may be used to line theater aisles or, in a home, could be run above baseboards or even under beds for a gently lit atmosphere before going to sleep.

In short, there's not much limit to how you use LED rope lights. Their use can be guided by your imagination.

​Lighting Supply carries LED rope lighting in 150' rolls in both warm white and cool white options. Our rope lights can be used in a single 150' run or cut into any number of 3' sections used with end caps and plugs. Our rolls of LED rope lights come with 3 end caps and 3 plugs to give you more flexibility with how you use the lights.

Are you still using compact fluorescent bulbs to light the home or office rather than switch to LED bulbs? If so, we carry over 100 spiral CFLs starting at $2 each (as of this writing), providing you with a selection that can meet just about any CFL lighting needs.

This includes several brands, bases, and color temperatures to choose from as well as wattages up to 105W. That's not a 105 watt replacement ... it's actually a 105 watt CFL, which is similar to a 420 watt incandescent bulb. Yes, that's a bright CFL!

But we also carry an 8-pack closeout where the bulbs are just $1.25 each. And these aren't just generic imports -- they're GE bulbs. This is the company that is no longer making CFLs now, but it's a name brand that made them for years.

Remember, CFLs -- or compact fluorescents -- last longer and work best indoors where they're not turned on and off quickly. This makes them ideal in living areas like kitchens and living rooms rather than in quicker use locations like closets or bathrooms where you're not spending time getting ready for the day. Used in this way, they really can provide you with years of lighting for far less energy than incandescent bulbs require.

When you have a setting that calls for different light levels at different times, a dimmer switch is one solution. But many of us have relied on 3-way incandescent bulbs for floor lamps or table lamps to provide this function. These are bulbs that can act as 40 watt, 60 watt, or 100 watt bulbs depending on how many times we turn a switch.

How do these 3-way bulbs work? They have two filaments. The first switch activates the 40 watt filament; the second turns that off and turns on the 60 watt filament; the final switch turns them both on for a combined 100 watt output. (Of course a 3-way bulb could provide different wattage levels; this is just one common version.)

Early in the move to LED light bulbs, 3-way LEDs weren't readily available. They have become so, though they're still not as common as LEDs with a single level of light output. Nor are they as inexpensive. But when you're looking for flexibility, they make for an easy solution.

Typical of our stance to carry brand name bulbs to give you the best lighting experience possible, we carry this Philips 3-way LED bulb that replaces a 40 / 60 / 100 watt 3-way incandescent bulb.

While BR40 LED flood bulbs come in a variety of wattages for different ceiling heights and applications, we've chosen a best value for 2016 for the common 65 watt incandescent replacement. Our video briefly reviews the BR40 LED in general and this "warm glow" bulb in particular, showing how it mimics an incandescent by getting a warmer look as it dims -- something that most LED bulbs don't do. Take a look.

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Metal halide lights are one of the tried-and-true solutions to outdoor and high bay lighting because of their efficacy (ability to create many lumens, or a lot of light, per watt) and their quality of light.

Part of the family of High Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps, metal halide lamps are the best in this family in terms of rendering colors correctly (as measured in CRI). While low pressure sodium lamps have a negative score on a traditional CRI scale of 0-100, and mercury vapor and high pressure sodium lamps typically score under 50 on this scale (well below 50 if they're not coated), metal halides score in the 60s and above (even into the 90s).

Though they don't generally produce as many lumens per watt as high and low pressure sodium bulbs, metal halides still have a high efficacy rating ... approximately equal to LED lamps (although this is a little misleading, as we'll explain below). So sodium lamps may be chosen to light up areas where light is needed for safety but not visual acuity (like along a park trail or at a construction site where no work is happening at night). Metal halide lamps are preferred when both the quality and quantity of light are important. Common uses include parking lots, streets, warehouses, and athletic fields.
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