Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the podcast about Lighting Matters. Our unflinching conversations uncover the nuances and complexities which shape the craft of lighting design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: We explore the pivotal whys behind a lighting designer's choices and find honest answers to your most challenging lighting questions. Because lighting matters.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Another podcast day here. This is Avi Moore with more light.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: And I'm Lisa Reed with Reed Burkett Lighting Design. Welcome to the Lighting Matters podcast.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: I love this podcast, and, Lisa, I'm so lucky to keep having these conversations with you. Thanks for continuing to play along and everybody listening. Thanks for. For listening. It's. It's great. We're. We're getting close to 500 followers. Very excited.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: It is great. I mean, you did trick me into doing this, Abby.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: How did I trick you?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: I don't know. It was going to be really easy. We were just going to do six episodes, you know, one hour, and then.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: We had too much fun.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, okay. We kept going. I do love it. Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: I mean, the. The guests, we've had the conversations, and it's. It's been great in the year. I mean, really. We started in August, and we've had a bunch of conferences since then, and a number of people just coming up and saying, we love the content. We've referred the content.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Did I tell you about this or did we talk about this? I'm going to give a shout out to Kathy Vandal in Kansas City Lightworks. Her office listens to the podcast and then has kind of a book club chat about each episode, which I think is fantastic.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Well, that's because they love talking to or listening to two KU alumni down there in Kansas City. So, yeah, that's where it's coming from.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Some of them do. Some of them love it.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I hear some of them are K Staters, so, you know, we got to be careful of that. Ever tell you the story? My ma came to visit me in Lawrence, and she rented a purple car. I told her she had to go return it and get a different one.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Did she get it really cheap? I mean, good grief.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Well, you know, like, she didn't know. She just went to the, you know, Avis or whatever, and they give her a car. It's like, yeah, Ma, you can't bring a purple car into Lawrence, Kansas.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: That's not possible. No, I used to like purple. I stopped wearing it when I went to ku.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, purple. Our wedding color was purple, but it was a different purple than that purple.
Anywho, we've both Been on stages this year. As the year comes to a close here in the next three weeks, November, Thanksgiving, and then nothing.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, you're saying it's over in three weeks. I like the sound of that. Except you have a lot to get done by the end of the year, but. Okay, I'll take it.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I have this list of things I gotta get done for the marketing team and. Oh, my God, the list is long. But we've both been on stages this year talking about some great topics and we thought it'd be good to put some of that out in this hemisphere.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Right. For sure. We've. We've both been presenting. I mean, I think that's something that a lot of lighting designers do is as, you know, do research or present as subject matter experts. I've been really excited about Randy's opportunity this year to give a presentation to the ASLA National Conference in Washington, D.C. they often have a lighting speaker. I don't think so. Randy Burkett and Nancy Clanton and Rick Utting gave a presentation about landscape lighting and heard there were over 300 people in the room. So that was exciting.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: What was the essence of the conversation or the presentation?
[00:03:59] Speaker B: It's a presentation that we've given or the Nancy, Rick and I gave at Enlightened Americas last year where Nancy, of course, talks about dark skies and, you know, the things that lighting is doing to the environment.
And then Rick kind of brings it all together into a business model and how you can use your knowledge as a subject matter expert to get more business and, you know, don't just, don't just dump things down or kind of give in. Right. But. But show your expertise to win business.
And then Randy or I have given case study of a large park project that we did and sort of the application of all these principles, how to actually bring it home in the real world.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Oh, that seems very interesting.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a fun one. I got to present it once and then listen to it.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Well, and then you and Randy also gave a very interesting presentation at ILD, talking about the multiple revisions of the St. Louis Arch Lighting design, as well as, I like, the tracking of the history of what we've done in this industry, both some of the technology and softwares, but also, you know, what was going on in the world through the decades.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: That was so fun. I. I'm so glad that we got to give that presentation.
I went to a retirement party a year ago or so, and these guys were talking about mailing in their plans to some manufacturer to have Calculations run and then having them mailed back. And it blew my mind. I was like, oh my gosh, like us mail, like, you know, weeks. You're talking about weeks to get a calculation done. And so that started me thinking about how the practice has changed over many years. And then last December, when we completed a third round of lighting design for the arch and the first LED lighting installation for the St. Louis Arch, we were talking about, well, the arch is now. Yeah, it's just past, I think, 60 years of being there. And we are also coming close to 20. I don't know, I'm not going to do the math. Anyway, it's been 20 to 25 years since our office designed the first lighting design for the arch. And so we've designed it three times. And it just felt like some significant anniversaries.
And so I was goading Randy to give a presentation about the lighting design of the arch, and he wasn't so sure. But I said, you know, at the same time, I've been wanting to give a presentation about how the practice has changed over these many years. So we threaded it together and it was a nice back and forth. So he talked about the early days of the arch and when it was built. It opened in 19, I want to say 1963. And he even went back to the design competition. The arch was created from a design competition. And he showed some of the other entries. They were fascinating to me. I hadn't seen a lot of those.
And then there was an early attempt to light the thing, but initially it was so specular and the sources were not powerful enough. So we had video footage of some mock ups that GE lighting had done back when it was first built. And so we were able to take the history all the way back to then. And of course, then I relayed the story about people mailing in their lighting calculations around that time and how things were done and that there were mockups, there were zonal cavity calculations, but things were not as, as precise as they are now. And so then just through the decades, the lighting practice changed. We, you know, you go from everything being on drafting tables with T squares and everything's straight lines and pencil drawings, my goodness. To software. Right then we started getting cad and we started getting that immediately was followed by lighting calculation software. And so watching the process of how things got more sophisticated but also sped up and things started happening faster. So, you know, you went from mailing your calculations to FedExing your rolls of lighting drawings to, you know, everything's instantaneous and now it's all shared in the cloud. Right. And so over the years, then multiple different lighting installations. In the late 90s is when they first were able to do a lighting design for the arch. But they didn't want to disrupt the plaza. They didn't want to have fixtures that ruined the pristine green plaza leading up to it. And so they built these deep vaults and the mockups and traveling all over town to view the light on the arch because it's viewed from everywhere in St. Louis and both sides, Illinois and Missouri.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: I like Randy talking about having to take the old camcorders with the VHS tapes and recording what it looked like. And then, you know, coming back with the car with the, you know, the sunroof or sunroof, and being able to review the video. But then you fast forward to, you know, what you guys just did. And you can do it with a phone.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: And share the video instantly.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Right. Everyone's looking at the same thing. You're talking on the phone. I mean, they were the first time around, they were talking on walkie talkies. I'm sure at some point they got out of range of each other and so, like you said, had to wait till they got back to see what they saw. It was a fun presentation to give. And I never liked history as a student, but I liked the stories. I like history. I just don't like taking tests on it, maybe. So it was fun to dig in and learn some of the history of when different programs came into existence and how one built on the other from Lumen one to Lumen Micro to AGI to ELUM Tools and so forth.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's funny. When you guys were making the presentation and as you were talking, I was thinking about when I was in college, I did this VR show and I rendered a lighting scene using etc source 4s. I had IES files for them and lit the stage and rendered it in 3D Studio Max. And I think I had maybe 25 lights. And to get an image, it took a day on the computer I had. And I built this huge server thing, you know, to. To make that happen.
And fast forward to today. We're working on an airport where we have 1800 to 4000 lights in an image and we can render that in. In 22 minutes on a laptop. So it's. It's pretty amazing. And I mean, that's. So I guess to make sure the age here. So that's like 2000-20, 24. Right. 24 years. How fast that's gotten. And it was Interesting. This. This weekend I. I had the kids to myself. My wife went on her. Her birthday, her fifth birthday trip for her birthday and just cruising through YouTube and found a really cool YouTube video. Talking about how these video cards work now and how they do V, not V ray, how they do rendering and all these different things and the calculations associated. It was really brilliant. I sent it to my team. They're like, wow, that's how that works. That's what the computer has to do in the background. It's amazing how that technology has come. I'll send it and we'll put it as a connection here. It's just amazing where we've gotten to. Right. And I think that this also came to me during the ILD conference is how long I've been doing all of this. And I started in the business and we were still doing incandescent and metal halide.
And then really within a few years we were doing led.
And I remember, and I don't know if you were there, Lisa. I think Randy was there. This initial Department of Energy meeting that was at the Catalyst Ranch here in Chicago. They got a group of people together to talk about the use of LEDs. Oh, no. I asked some people. I'm trying to find an image. Like, we must have taken a photo of this gathering. But really from that point, which had to have been early 2000s, so it had to been 2006 would be my bet. Ish. And we're in 2024. Right. So 20 years. Less than 20 years. We're 100% led at this point. I mean, obviously still a little incandescent here and there.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: No, not. Not much. And it has changed so fast. I think about what I learned in school and thinking that I was learning what I was going to use in my profession, and it really wasn't at all. Because it just changes and has continued to change so fast.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Which is a great segue into what we've been talking about.
A little bit more technology based than I would love, but I think it's a key design tool, which is dolly controls. Dolly dimming.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: I got to hear you speak on that at the IES conference. But you just this week you were at a Dali summit. Is that the right. Is that what it was?
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Yeah. The Dali Alliance. Who is responsible for the Dali standard? Not Salvador Dali, although I still would love to get a print of his work and put it up. I like his work, but they manage the standard. So if you think about dmx, we've used DMX for years. Thank Goodness. As opposed to analog to control moving lights and color changing fixtures and dimmers in theaters. It's managed by USITT and it's an ANSI standard, but there isn't any verification. Whereas Dall? E is an alliance, a group of organization companies that have come together to manage a standard. And we just came back from the first ever North American Summit.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: Very cool.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: But what I found really interesting is I've been using that standard in the United States for 15 years.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: Avi, you're an OG.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: An OG, yeah.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Original, right?
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Oh, original. And the first project we did was the Wit Hotel in Chicago with Dolly. And at that time, Lutron was actually calling it Dolly. And I think a month after the project opened, they started calling it Ecosystem, which is not Dall? E. But if you've used the Ecosystem, you've used Dall? E. So that's one thing that I can say in this podcast, that I can't stay on a stage. They are the same. The way I always explain it to people is the whole world has decided that a sentence should end with a period. That manufacturer decided that you should start the sentence with a period. And it's the only big difference between Ecosystem and Dall? E was just a slight difference and an incompatibility that ultimately that was created. But those who have Ecosystem now can't get any parts or pieces, so their best route for retrofitting is to go to Dall? E, because it's the same wiring and same everything. Anyway, long story short, it's been a great couple of presentations. You know, the key to this is that it's cheaper and it works. There are lots of other amazing features that come with it, but it's kind of been my feeling that none of that really matters in the North American market. It is the cheapest way to meet code requirements and guarantee to your customer it will dim smoothly and dim to a low end. And I don't know if we've posted Julio's comments or not. I don't know where we're going to put this podcast versus Julio, but he does mention in our talk how low we can dim a restaurant. It's the way we used to do it, right? With incandescent.
[00:17:02] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: And now we just use two new wires and we get there.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Yeah. No reason to lower our standards with new technology. It should be improving, not getting worse.
Think about that in a lot of aspects of led, like glare and flicker.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: And control and color, too, right?
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Like, I think that's a big one.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: White tuning is one of the greatest Things that we have put back into our lighting language. This whole trying to select a color temperature. How if you have daylight coming in, but you want a warm environment, you need the amber shift of an incandescent lamp. You just need it. Like that's required. So great. We have this technology that does an amber shift. Okay, so let's make it. That's easy.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: What you just said, the way you said it reminded me of a residential client from, gosh, maybe 10 years ago who said, why do I have to pick. Why do I have to pick a color temperature? And so it was one of. It was our first color tunable white project.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: And I wonder just to. I'm not sure about this, Lisa, but something I welcome you and our fellow lighting designers to be cautious of. I think we need to clarify our language. Which is warm. Dim. Right. As it dims, it's going to warm up. But you don't have the ability to modify color with intensity.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: White tuning, anything that allows you to go along the black body. Right. So people might call it whites. It's something that follows different whites. We should. I think we should be calling that white tuning. I don't know if I has defined that or not. We. White tuning. Color tuning. Every color, any color. Whites, blues, greens, reds, whatever. Because each one of those three products exist. And I think it's important to make sure we use the language that allows you to do. Well, if you buy a white tuning product, you can't get blue. Right. Whereas if you buy a color tuning product or specify a color tuning product, it lets you do white and color.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Yes. And I think that's. That's the language I use. But it would be nice to have some universality in how we talk about lighting products.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: I think it all still confuses clients. And you have to just have a nice concise way of describing it, like you just did, so.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Absolutely. And showing it to them. I mean, the power and what we've been able to show with Dolly in the two presentations we've done this year is number one, the cost. There's nothing cheaper. We did a residential high rise here in Chicago. There's a 5% increase in cost to go to 0 to 10 versus Dolly. And that was the price from the electrician. That wasn't my price. That wasn't from the rep agencies. It wasn't from anything else. This was the electrician telling the customer that for the last six months they were complaining about Dolly being more expensive. But in actuality, dolly was a 5% or, excuse me, 0 to 10 was a 5% increase in cost.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: So we lost six months complaining about a ve increase. It's a resi high rise. They weren't going to spend that money. So that's the first piece. And then the second piece is we talk about this all the time. And you know, kind of goes back to that 10 years, 15 years ago, when we started doing LED. Yet any LED fixture manufacturer to write on their letterhead that every product they they sell to your customer will dim perfectly signed by the CEO without any specific information about the dimmer, the driver or anything associated. They will not sign that document.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: No, no, of course not.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: If you specify dolly, you can get that letter signed because it's in the spec for the standard.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: So one of the things we did this week was we asked Usai and lsi, two sponsors of the podcast in the past.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: To send us each two fixtures that had Dall E2 drivers in them. Now, mind you, I just said a very scary thing, right? All I want is Dali 2 and white tuning. Sorry, I said white tuning. Dali 2 products. And of course, what were their first reactions? Well, which product? Give us a part number. I said, no, no, no, no. I need this in a week. Just make me whatever you can easily and bring it to the session here in New York.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: So you didn't, you didn't have it ahead of time? You just.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Yeah, Nope. And no specific part numbers. I still, to this day, I don't know the specific part numbers of the products we were given. Because it doesn't matter.
We took our dolly device, our dolly sending device, our little programmer, and a couple of way goes, we had to run the CVS to get some extension cords, cut off the ends, power it all up, hooked it all up to the dolly side, clicked address, it worked perfectly. So as a lighting designer and as owners out there, anybody who's kind of looking at challenges they've had with lighting and seeing flicker and seeing these things come together and them not working well, you can remove a lot of that just by using this protocol. And it's a simple thing. It's super simple. And everybody has it. Every fixture manufacturer now has that possibility.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: And in Europe, it's the standard. Is that right?
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Correct. And it's the standard for a couple of reasons that I learned recently. One is their kind of universal standardization in Europe, which is really great, but also their non proprietary standardization. A lot of lawsuits going on with Microsoft and Google and some of these other things about proprietary elements. I think the thing I always think about Is there was the lawsuit of the lightning cable that Apple was doing, that little flat thing on the iPads and phones. Well, now they're not allowed to do that in Europe. They have to use a standard USB. Most of it's that USB3 kind of micro connection. And now you're starting to see that across the board from Apple.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that same influence making Dall E the standard for dimming controls.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Because it works with everybody. Everybody's in, everybody's out. It just works. It's a standardized thing. And you have a non for profit association of manufacturers that are writing this standard. And now with Dall E2 certifying every product that carries that label. So this is also a really great example. And so, Lisa, I'm going to put you on the spot here. Have you ever done a DMX project where some of the DMX fixtures just didn't work for some reason?
[00:24:28] Speaker B: I don't know. Probably I don't have like one that's coming to mind.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: But yes, we've had it many times. And it's manufacturers typically that ground the shield of dmx. The shield is not a ground, but if you ground that shield, you will have issues with dmx.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: There is no third party organization that is reviewing DMX products and saying this meets the DMX requirements. Right. You kind of get it and you hope it works. And if it doesn't work, there's ways around it. The Dall E2 specification to carry that label requires certification, requires somebody to review and make sure that that product actually meets the requirements of Dall E2. That's pretty huge. I mean, it's the first of its kind. I mean, there's three different standards for 0 to 10, and they all work a little bit differently. Right. DMX, as we just discussed. Right. They're. There's a standard, but you don't necessarily meet the standard just because you're DMX. But to be a Dali2 product with that label means that it's been third party verified. So if you're a designer, hey, you know this is going to work. You're an owner, you know it's going to work. You're an electrician, you know it's going to work.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: That's something we can all agree that we want on our projects.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: And I will say this, I bears repeating. There are two major problems we've had when specifying Dall E on projects. The number one biggest problem, loose wire nuts. If the wires aren't connected, the light fixture will not work. Pretty simple, right? Push the test Button doesn't turn on and off. Most likely it's a loose wire nut or a loose wire, the driver, whatever it may be. That's the number one biggest problem we have. The second biggest problem, misprogrammed drivers by the luminaire manufacturers. And I'm sure you've seen it in other situations beyond Dolly. But that could be the wrong dimming curve in the driver, that could be the wrong milliamp settings, that could be a host of other issues associated. We had a project, the warm wires were on the cool channel and the cool wires were on the warm channel.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: How hard is that to find when that happens?
[00:26:55] Speaker A: As soon as you start dimming, you usually could find that pretty easily. And that's another great thing that could be found. Before the lighting system gets commissioned, there's usually a test button. Push the button, once the lights turn on, push it again, lights turn off. So you can test for loose wire nuts in that scenario. And broken light fixtures. Right. On, off, on, off. Light doesn't turn on and off. You have a loose wire nut or a busted driver. Right?
[00:27:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: The second issue, like on mis, programmed drivers typically press and hold that button. The lights dim if you press and hold, wait till about 50% and then look at like a 80 foot long linear cove and there are segments that are brighter.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: So you know what?
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's going to be driver or the wrong led. Again, it's a manufacturing issue. It has nothing to do with the electrician or the lighting control system. And these are all really great tools that the electricians could use to, you know, pre check the work before somebody comes on site.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: And how's, how's it going on your projects with electricians? How fast do they come up to speed and decide that, you know, to become advocates for Dolly?
[00:28:17] Speaker A: So any of the electricians we've worked with that have done Dolly want to do it again? So we do a lot of work with Block Electric here in town. Shout out to my good friend Michael Block, who. He and I went to college together, excuse me, high school together. So we've used and refer them a lot. Union Electrician here in Chicago. They did the.
Sorry, it's just defeated me. The Starbucks Roastery on Michigan Avenue. And I don't know who the lighting designer was. If you were the lighting designer, let us know. But it's an all Dolly system. And they said if they would have had to do that with 0 to 10 or ELV, the troubleshooting associated with that would have been twice as much time. And really the Biggest response I get is journeymen or journey persons, electricians. They can all count to 55. Well, you sure hope they can. Right. And pulling four wires and counting to 55 is really easy. And so when you're in a dolly situation, you can really kind of leave the wiring in the field and not have to have a control systems expert on your electrician staff to manage the lighting control system. Right.
So far I've gotten that response.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: That sounds great.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: As we've shown, it's less wiring, it's less complexity, but there is commissioning time and I think the GCs are having the biggest challenge with it, because how much time do they leave at the end to actually make the lighting control system work?
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Oh, none.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: Right. Even when you bring it up in pre construction, pre bid meetings, it just doesn't happen. And I would say that the electricians I've talked to, that's kind of been their biggest problem is they're, you know, lighting's the. The first thing they get ve'd. It's the last piece that comes together in the building.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Because we need everything else done. Right. The drywall has to be installed, sanded and painted before you can put the trim in. And the last thing that goes in the ceiling is the trim is the electrician. Right. There's just not enough time at the end of the jobs because something gets delayed. And that's been a challenge.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: I can see that would be. Because I don't see that changing the getting done earlier just to do commissioning well.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: And as you were talking about the arch and thinking about the history of design. Right. Like we're doing things faster and faster every day. I mean, you and I have talked. We had a project. We designed 250,000 square feet from schematic design to biddable 50% CD drawings in 60 days. I mean, it's nuts.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: It is.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: And that project opens in March, in five months. So it's not getting any shorter. Lead times are still long. So any opportunity we can get to speed things along is really key. And there is a really interesting thing out there that I think the world should take a closer look at. And I don't know if you've looked at this at all. Lisa is DC Distribution for lighting.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: Oh, right, Yeah. I have looked at that.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: We don't do that much lay in offices. It's just not our core business. But if you think about a big office environment and you think about having to put in all those junction boxes and whips to all of those two by twos or two by fours. Not in Chicago. Right. Because everything in Chicago is in conduit outside of Chicago. You can, you know, run things free air. It's the wild west. Apparently.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: It is.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: But imagine a, a box that you can run your high voltage to and then call for inspection. Then put in your ceiling grid, paint everything, get done and just run out four wire, speaker wire, almost, almost the old left channel, right channel stuff. And you can power at 57 volts and dolly your light fixtures and you can still get individual control of every light. So this is not poe, this is DC and dolly distribution.
And I think cost wise, there's still a conversation to be had. There's a little bit of proprietary nature to that system out there, but a means to call for rough in inspection sooner. That's interesting. Now what's interesting in all this conversation, we're not talking about lighting design. We're talking about how to get the lighting design on the job, make the electrician and the contractor happier, faster. Right?
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Right. If we can solve some of these other issues, then we can get the lighting design that we really want, that our clients will really love on the job.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: And it's thinking this big picture. Right. It's. It is how do you get from the end to the beginning and make it all happen? Right. I think it's interesting to think about these different ideas so that you can get the design you wanted. So you can turn to that electrician and say, well, hey, if I made this easier for you to wire, can't you get that done faster?
[00:34:12] Speaker B: Right. If I can solve a problem for you, then can't you support the design that we want?
[00:34:20] Speaker A: And so, you know, as you were asking, what do the electricians think, I follow now, now that I understand what I'm doing, because Derek put it so elegantly, but I really follow his mantra of the if you need less wires, isn't this cheaper and stop talking. And it's so great what happens in those situations. And one of the things we talked about in both of our sessions is if anybody has a client out there that wants to pay more for labor, sounds great. But I think in the end, our goal and our customers goals are to get the products they want and the solution they want. And if that means they can reduce labor, which is really a lost cost. Right. That labor isn't something that improves the end product. Obviously you need the labor to get to the end product.
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Right. And craftsmanship improves the end product. But yes, labor is not something you see in your building after it's all done.
[00:35:30] Speaker A: So let's find that solution. Right.
What I did find interesting, I think this came up in an ILD session, was if the product is sold as easier to install, most contractors won't agree with that concept until they've done it once.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: What we're talking about is beyond that. Right. This is conduit and wire and things that they're pricing. Right. A thing to install is a thing to install. Whether it happens to be a little bit easier because of this or that or the other, I think is a harder sell versus that other big responsibility electricians have, which is wiring it, running all the condo, running all those boxes, making it work. So flip the switch, the light turns on.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Well, and you had that great example of a contractor who was trying to make the case that Dolly costs more. And they gave you the numbers. You know, they had to have been biased in the direct, you know, on the install direct, you know, they had to be assuming that it wasn't easier. And they still.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And for those who I kind of missed, the most important part of that analysis is when they first provide us the pricing. They did mark up the dolly fixtures 27% and the zero to 10 volt fixtures 15%. But they were aware of the fact that we were going to also receive all of their numbers, their raw numbers. So when we were able to rectify it, that's when we found that the fixtures were the same cost. So the increase in cost all came from conduit wire labor and the cost of the lighting control systems. The 0 to 10 is substantially more expensive than Dolly. There's more components.
So anyway, dwelling on a very technical subject here, but you know, I think it's important to realize and you know, it also goes to bear, I think, with what you and Randy did at the Arch. You know, I think I mentioned this to you when I saw. Saw you out there, is that when I first saw some of the photos and I was like, wait, moving lights? Oh, yeah, yeah. Moving lights in an install. But then as. As you and Randy talked about it, and obviously the article I read didn't go nearly as far as you two both went, but what you did and how you got that arch lit as amazingly as it is now with moving lights. And one of the beautiful things I think, to that design, if I can shed some amazingness on the design application, is that moving lights are incredible. Right. When we put them on stage, when we put them on rigging systems, we spray paint where the clamps are. And so when you take a fixture that happens to break out and put it back in in exactly the same place, within millimeters, Change the address and plug it in. It will be exactly the same. As you and Randy were talking about the application and what you did, like, it clicked in my mind of that kind of maintainability for that in addition to all the design capabilities of tweaking and optics and everything you did with shutters. And I was just still kind of blown away with the application and how it works.
It really is brilliant.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you. I mean, the maintenance was really the impetus for making the switch to LED when we did. Because the cost of the lamps my husband just found on, I don't know, I'll say Instagram somewhere. He just found old arch lights for sale. And they're for sale. $350 each. They don't have any lamps. They're not working.
But I forget how else it was advertised. And I said I wanted to put a buyer beware. The lamps cost over $500 each. So if you want to make it work, it's not cheap.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Yeah. One of my first jobs out of high school was working at Chicago Spotlight and we had Super Troopers that went to the United center for concert. Super Troopers use the same 500 watt arc source. And you know, OSHA officially states full explosive protection gear because the lamp is at such a high pressure and a failed lamp like is. It can explode on you and it goes off like a bomb. I mean, it. That. Because it's these. I mean. And for those of you who haven't seen these lamps, there's a tube with. Inside a tube with 2.2arc sources that with a huge voltage creates an arc between them and then the gases inside. I mean, it's just. It's super amazing. But those are really dangerous sources. And I remember having to climb up into the United center and get into those things with this whole suit on. The change of lamp.
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Is. Yeah. I mean, but that's what you needed. I mean, if you're going that distance.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Yeah. That was the only way to get that much. I remember using them to light a bridge when I worked in Los Angeles.
Yeah. To give you those throw distances. That's the only option.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: And I think, like, as we're getting on our time, I think what's really cool about that is like you can take that evolution from before and now into led.
I meant to talk about this when we were talking about the dolly stuff, but we did the Chicago Post office here, Mies van der Rohe in Federal Plaza, and we got involved during one of The Obama era projects. And we were able to retrofit from metal halide to compact fluorescent because LED wasn't there yet. You need 60 foot candles for mail sorting. That was still back when they were hand doing it in this facility. And we actually got hired by Block Electric to review the engineer's design. We were able to actually do the whole project. And we did an open spec dolly as opposed to a proprietary spec that the engineer had.
And we brought back the Mies van der Rohe detail. So if you ever are walking around city of Chicago, go to Federal Plaza, walk in the post office. That is the original detail that all of those plaza sites were supposed to have. But I bring it up as similar to the Arch concept is we're currently in the process of replacing everything to led.
[00:42:27] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: And what's so awesome is we have to buy new light fixtures, right? Compact fluorescent versus led. We need the optics, not just shoving in LED replacement compact fluorescents. And this really came from. You can't get compact fluorescent dolly drivers anymore. But other than buying all the light fixtures and it's a quick like half turn, remove, replace thing, the only other piece we had to buy was the lighting control processor. Because the processor is 12 years old, the new processor has more processing power. And then they have to readdress like this is a direct replacement, quick fix because it's open protocol, because yada, yada yada, right? All they have to do is remove, replace readdress, take the programming from the old processor, put it in the new one.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: Oh, that's really, that's really exciting. I love that.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Again, like, I love it because it's just a simple, I mean it's a, it's a Mies van Roe building, right down lights, perfect square grid thing. But the technology hidden behind. And then, you know, what was happening during bid time, every rep agency in Chicago. Hey, can we, can we, you know, put in a control system? Can we swap this control system? Can we do this through that? We need a $300 processor.
Everything else stays the same. No changes to OX sensors, no changes to daylight sensors, no changes in the touchscreen keypads. Anything else. It's a $300 processor and you know, 100 and some odd downlights.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:44:07] Speaker A: Pretty cool. It's pretty cool.
[00:44:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the similarities that we had at the Arch was we were able to put these new luminaires into the existing vaults. Had to build new checks because we had to do two for one replacement. They weren't as big, but that Gives us great redundancy though if something does fail. Now we have two sources on every spot anyway. So, yeah, I, you know, I have a heart for sustainability and for things being reusable and lasting a long time. So I love those stories. I get very excited about that.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: Well, and I just, I want to advocate again at the end of this podcast episode for two things. One is I think there should be a 10 year award for designs required to take new photography, but you should go out and see it again. Right. And I think the arch is one of those things where it's replaced. Right. You replace some product but the design is still the same design. And I think that is something that should apply. I think the post office, you know, there's work that we've all done that you can go see it 10 years later and it still looks the same because it's well maintained, it had maintenance capabilities to it, so on and so forth. So that's one thing I like to kind of end with and the other thing to remind people to continue to advocate out there for lighting design. As you're seeing projects posted by anybody anywhere that does not include a lighting designer, to ask who the lighting designer is and I'm going to shout out to Pinnacle this week I noticed a post, beautiful post. They had four different projects in this post talking about their products and I asked who are the lighting designers? And they unfortunately don't know who the lighting designers are on the jobs. They did repost and state who the where they had gotten the photos from. So again, I welcome anybody out there who have seen that post. If you're the lighting designer, make sure to get out there and post and keep asking who is the lighting designer? And there may not have been one, but let's make that public too.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
You'll start to see Avi and me and the Lighting Matters podcast commenting all around LinkedIn asking this question, who was the lighting designer? Let's advocate for each other.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: Absolutely, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to have a conversation with you. I hope our audience enjoyed this conversation today.
[00:46:48] Speaker B: Thank you, Avi. I am just glad I got through it without a huge coughing fit. But you know, inside jokes there. No, it's great talking to you. I'm glad that we had another conversation, just the two of us.
[00:47:03] Speaker A: Absolutely. We'll keep this going and we look forward to your comments post in LinkedIn and we'll talk to you all soon on another podcast.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: All right, send us your comments.
Lighting Matters. As we wrap up, we want to reiterate how much we value your time, and we hope you found it as much fun to listen to as we had creating it. Remember to like it and share this content with your friends and colleagues.
[00:47:31] Speaker A: The opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the sponsors. Our content has general application, but we recommend obtaining personalized guidance from a professional IALD lighting designer such as RBLD or More Lights for your next endeavor.
