Nigel Harvey is the Chief Executive at Recolight, a lamp recycler in the UK. We wanted to know how effective extended producer responsibility programs really are and whether or not they’ve hit a limit on the number of compliant operators. We weigh the pros and cons of enforcement and persuasion when it comes to recycling, and the strategies that come into play on both sides. Aside from the business of recycling Nigel likes to take moral stands. Online marketplaces are letting some groups sell la...
Nov 02, 2020•57 min
Adrià Huguet-Ferran is CTO of Kumux, a software company that allows you to optimize almost any LED lightsource for color-tuning. The goal is for more human-centric or circadian-friendly systems, but Michael and Greg think his company’s process needs to be reduced to a one-button solution. That may not be so simple as we bring cultural and geographical biases and individual preferences to lighting systems all the time, forcing color and intensity to follow the clock is an uphill battle for some e...
Oct 25, 2020•40 min
Tom Boyle, of GE Current, a Daintree Company joins Michael and Greg for this week’s episode. After clarifying what a Chief Technical Officer is responsible for, he shares his perspective on twenty years of change in the lighting industry, and Daintree’s renewed focus on LED and controls he gets into his company’s entry into UV-C Disinfection. We discussed the various options that are emerging for UV-C and how it should be deployed as a layer in a range of cleaning solutions. Tom brought up the i...
Oct 19, 2020•34 min
Human-centric light is a selfish idea. Jane Slade is an expert in how anthropogenic light at night is harming all wildlife to some degree. In this rebroadcast of our live stream from last year’s IES Annual Conference she shares her work with Michael and Greg. We keep learning new things about the damage ALAN does, whether that’s sending dung beetles walking in circles or slowing down the motion of free radicals in the air, but the solution is always the same: turn off the lights, then tell other...
Oct 12, 2020•37 min
Bryan Colligan founded Atlas Lighting in his basement in 1977, it didn’t leave that basement until 1999 when host Michael joined the company. Greg takes the lead asking questions about forty years worth of changes to the lighting industry, founding his own company, working by hand, being a frequent flyer on Air Chicken, and training salespeople. Beyond his career Bryan shares his insights into business relationships, succession in a family business, and the power of working the order desk....
Oct 05, 2020•49 min
This week we have a crossover episode with Sam Koerbel of Lytei. Before he was an architectural engineer he was a mascot for his college football team, and that sense of building character and expressing enthusiasm is what drives his podcasts and video series. Embodying excitement to encourage others is fun in it’s own right, but it can also be very valuable. Michael and Greg spoke with him about spreading lighting design to the masses - everyone knows a poorly lit room when they see it, but kno...
Sep 28, 2020•42 min
Tom Ciurczak, industry veteran and president of BLC America has dropped an album. He’s been a singer and songwriter his whole life, and his daughter nudged him to actually releasing an album. Call me Ishmael is a mix of work from his whole life showcasing a number of styles and moods. Michael and Greg have heard the album, liked it, and asked him on the show to discuss songwriting, the pros and cons of different creative approaches. Beyond the stalkers, smugglers and outlaws to liars, losers and...
Sep 21, 2020•48 min
Ellis Yan is back to finish telling the story of his career, starting back in 1979 as the Chinese government begins to emphasize quality of life for its citizens Ellis was in school to become an accountant and working in a computer lab (this was in the punch-card era of computing, just in case you thought Ellis was ever behind the cutting edge). He tells the story of how he met his wife, made friends with a man called Big Buddha and how he and his brother started a company in 1986, making MR16s ...
Sep 14, 2020•55 min
Last week Michael tested positive for COVID-19, Spencer Miles has had employees come up positive, and Greg’s been lucky so far. We’ve spoken about doing business during the lockdown, but now we can speak to more immediate damage control experiences. Spencer and Michael share how they resumed business, worked around downed employees, and their experiences running the order desk again. Procedures and policy are extremely varied region-to-region, hopefully you don’t have to deal with anything like ...
Sep 07, 2020•33 min
This week, we reversed roles and let our guest ask us questions. New lighting and energy consultant, Ryan Krueger, has a list of questions for us. Listen in to find out: ● What makes distribution unique ● How we learned all this before starting the podcast ● What catalogues and courses looked like in the pre-LED era ● Approaches to fieldwork when we started out ● Greg’s easy choice to get his LC certification ● How to deal with bad audits ● What those plastic seals do ● How tapped is the market,...
Aug 31, 2020•57 min
“The current pandemic has created a tipping point for networked controls in lighting.” That’s what Peter Brown sent us in an email earlier this month, rather than reply we got him on the line to talk this out for the show. Our assumptions about lighting have been inverted; the cost rule of 3 dollars for utilities, 30 for rent, and 300 for personnel is out the window and we need to spend more on new utilities just to get that 300 back into the building. Beyond that we get into recovery planning, ...
Aug 24, 2020•36 min
Ellis Yan returns to continue his life story for us. Picking back up on the farm in the mountains, he shares how the experience built up his resilience and made him more open to new experiences, but the plot takes a small turn when his family living in the US try to arrange for a visa for him - something that wouldn’t pay off until he was attending University in Shanghai and his application got reviewed under new rules for students. After a few misadventures with the local bureaucracy he had to ...
Aug 17, 2020•47 min
Bernie Erickson of Facilities Solutions Group is in the middle of expanding his company's offerings in UV disinfection options, so we had to ask him on the show to share what he’s been working on. He breaks down the differences between surface and air disinfection as he sells it, as well pointing out secondary gains from adding air purification. What he has noticed is that his customers seem to have their own phases for adoption of UV purification moving from portable units to more permanent ins...
Aug 10, 2020•42 min
Al Uszynski returns as a podcast guest to speak about his perspective on and his personal history in the lighting industry. Launching Inside.Lighting to keep track of rep agencies, but ended up writing news to keep the site relevant. Once agents are up for discussion we have to dig into the friction points between distributors and rep agents, and how our modes and models of business are changing in response to changes in the manufacturing business. Now that the classic big three have left the la...
Aug 03, 2020•4 sec
The LRC has put together a very cool web-based tool for designing a space for healthier living (https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/healthyliving/), after playing around with it ourselves, we asked the minds behind it for an interview. Allison Thayer and Dr. Mariana Figueiro joined us to share how they created this site and how they plan to expand it. We discussed how hard it is to improve productivity in humans and that we should just stick to lighting occupants can work in enjoyably. Some that means balan...
Jul 27, 2020•1 hr 23 min
We’ve always known that Ellis Yan has a story to tell. We take a break from lighting technology and delve into history, as Ellis explains his life under The Cultural Revolution under Mao. It starts with the day he was sent to school without lessons, moves through years of bullying teachers, and attacks on capitalists and intellectuals before being shipped out to the mountains. He lived with nine other teenagers in a two-room building in a remote farming village where he had to learn to farm, coo...
Jul 20, 2020•48 min
Henrik Clausen has thirty years of experience as an electrical engineer, educator, and a consultant. And when he wrote for LED Professional calling for brighter, more personalized light at work (read it here: https://www.led-professional.com/resources-1/articles/personal-lighting-profiles-might-be-the-key-to-creating-a-natural-work-light-balance), we knew we had to ask him about it. While it’s true that an aging workforce will need more light, we ended up debating how to implement these ideas. W...
Jul 13, 2020•44 min
Al Uszynski has trained salespeople at the university level and he joined us to share his insights on selling right now. He shares some adaptations to current restrictions as well as creative ideas for selling online that will be even more useful when we can get face-to-face. But the real question that comes out of this conversation is: Should we be asking sales staff to be marketers? Can we really learn new tricks? And what are we losing as we pass through the quarantine? We also call for a new...
Jul 06, 2020•36 min
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is moving past energy efficiency research and into researching better life indoors. One of their projects was looking into ‘realistic’ lighting in an Neonatal ICU. Andrea Wilkerson, senior lighting researcher, shared her findings for sun-like colour and brightness automation. Beyond what happened during the test we explore some of the broader implications of circadian entrainment and it’s ability to signal behaviour and mood in subtle ways. We also settl...
Jun 30, 2020•46 min
Kevin Poyck just had his legs under him as CEO and President of Signify’s Americas Market Group when the outbreak threw his business into chaos. He shares his thoughts on virtual offices, managing at a distance, and the shape of post-pandemic normalcy. What really brought him to our show today was a recent study at Boston University that confirmed how effective a new Signify UVC lamp really is, which leads to a vintage Philips UV disinfection manual and the modern rush for germicidal lamps. It’s...
Jun 25, 2020•32 min
Ray Molony edits Lux Review, and in one month into lockdown he wrote what he considered to be the eight effects the lighting sector will see coming out of the current health crisis. Read that here: https://www.luxreview.com/2020/04/14/8-effects-of-the-crisis-on-the-lighting-sector/. After seeing it we had to invite him to push back and expand on his ideas, we shared our thoughts on established brands losing footing, payment terms changing, calls for quality over savings, local production, what t...
Jun 22, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Signify’s Robert Lee returns to the show to elaborate on an article he wrote for LEDs Magazine on what SSL lighting will look like in 2030 - you can read it here: https://www.ledsmagazine.com/smart-lighting-iot/article/14168528/picture-the-future-of-ssl-within-the-mirror-world-magazine We get into the technologies that will converge to make the next decade of lighting a mirrorworld of augmented reality. We also go over topics like consumer apathy in the face of new features, cost increases, the ...
Jun 15, 2020•45 min
Jim Colantoni starts our conversation with him explaining the background of his company and how they’re working to create lighting tools for health and wellness. We get into the background and particulars of UVC technologies. Michael and Greg delve into discussions of safety concerns, future building codes, the lack of efficiency of LED in this case, confrontations with buzzwords, and the growing importance of listening to the customer.
Jun 08, 2020•1 hr 20 min
The King of Lighting, Ellis Yan, returns to the main series and he brought Lesley Matt, Senior VP of Sales at TCP Along with him. They share their current virtual lunch and learn series, and the company’s own rebate and incentive program before diving into the real lighting dork content with us. We discussed offering more colors, building drivers, modularity and replaceable parts in outdoor lighting, the meaning of ‘Full Spectrum’, creating something will match the usefulness of MR16s, and creat...
Jun 01, 2020•37 min
We’re taking a short break from our usual lighting dork topics this week to chat with Tyler Gildin about his documentary The Starfish, which profiles his grandfather’s journey from Nazi Germany to Sweden, across the USSR, and over the pacific ocean to reunite with his parents. Chatting about Herb Gildin’s life in America and building Satco leads to discussions of overcoming adversity, building a business and personal brand, treating employees like family and the drives and motivations that creat...
May 25, 2020•37 min
Tom Beckett and some colleagues in his side of lighting spent three years setting up an ANSI certification for flashlights, and once they were done they turned that team into the Portable Lights American Trade Organization to maintain standards across seven metrics as the industry moved into LED. We talked over testing procedures, the issue of enforcement versus advising members, and learning to work with color-rendering as a relevant metrics in the world of portable and battery powered lighting...
May 18, 2020•47 min
In April, the Illuminating Engineering Society and the International Dark Sky Association released a joint statement on the five practices to best confront light pollution. We’re here to speak with IDA’s Ruskin Hartley and the IES’ Brian Liebel about that, and the broader implications of electric light at night. Light pollution is real pollution, it’s something we create that harms people and animals, and as much as we can raise awareness among consumers we may need to call on regulators to make...
May 11, 2020•4 min
4-time guest Mark Lien returns to act as the lighting industry’s very own futurist. We discussed the ease of charting the direction of change as opposed to predicting its pace, the marking of epochs, where our particular businesses stand at the moment, lighting controls leaving lighting’s hands, and other long term trends for our field. Also on the discussion slate: contemporary geopolitics, macroeconomics, and the plague.
May 04, 2020•55 min
Westlite’s Brenda Puckett knows that there’s no constant in our industry but change, and that if you can’t be an agent for change your company won’t thrive. We joined her at her office earlier this year to chat about doing more than selling bulbs to people, conservation in the era of throwaway tech, trying to keep things simple as SKUs pile up and we replace whole fixtures, as well as the question of state’s rights.
Apr 27, 2020•1 hr 20 min
We’ve noticed a spike in requests for UV lamps and fixtures recently and aside from reading the side of the box over the phone, we don’t have a clue what to tell anyone. Fortunately, Karl Platzer and Fred van Lierop of UV Lamp Consulting were kind enough to share their considerable expertise on the subject with us all. The two of them talk through the nuts and bolts of the UV spectrum, it’s applications, and how technology gets tested and certified. Bringing it back to lighting dorks; there’s a ...
Apr 20, 2020•53 min
