Please Redesign the Downlight

By David K. Warfel

One of our team members has been hunting for a house to buy for the last few months and visited a model home by one of the largest builders in the United States. The builder’s website touts their passion for innovation and commitment to leading-edge design. Yet their ceilings are dotted with glare-inducing disc lights that deliver lumens like a cheap yard sprinkler: indiscriminately and with little regard for people passing through. They build thousands of these homes every year, and they are not alone.

A modern million dollar show home entry lit with disc lights puts light in all the wrong places.

Photograph by Brady King

It would be easy to condemn this builder for their ignorance, their greed, and their lack of concern for what happens after sunset in their homes. But that would require overlooking our own role in shaping the lighting industry. We – the designers, manufacturers, sellers, and more – are responsible for the horrible lighting in those homes. We can do better.

Residential lighting today seems stuck in a Betamax reality, and that is not a good thing for homeowners. We live in an era of constant innovation – arguably a good thing – that leaves homeowners in a state of constant confusion. We live in an era of rapid product improvement – also arguably a positive – that results in residential lighting in an era of rapid obsoletion. We can do better, but it may require checking our commercial lighting expertise at the front door of our homes. If you are anything like me, you already do this subconsciously.

THE RESIDENTIAL CODE SWITCH

At work, I try to encourage creativity, emphasize originality, push towards the technological frontier, and seek constant innovation. I join our team in learning about new products every week. I attend trade shows and tour factories to stay on top of what is coming next.

I undergo a confusing transformation on my way home. Suddenly, I forget my day job; I just want to stop by the local hardware or big box store, pop in, and walk out a few minutes later with a reasonably priced, reliable, and well-functioning replacement for whatever light has recently stopped working.

In other words, at work I want to specify a cutting-edge lighting system. On my way home, I just want to buy a light bulb. My daily code switch points out the stark difference between commercial and residential lighting.

Commercial lighting – at least how I practice it – depends on several key factors for success. First, our clients have to be willing to spend real money on lighting. For reasons that are not always clear to me, corporate willingness to spend on lighting seems greater than individual residential willingness. Perhaps this dichotomy results from the difference between spending “the company’s money” versus writing a check that draws on our own personal account. We are generally a little more careful in the latter situation, which means our approach to residential lighting must be more frugal.

Secondly, commercial lighting can rest on the fact that businesses change rapidly. Any lighting system I specify today may be capable of lasting twenty or forty years, but the space it occupies may change ownership or function in just five to ten years, providing another opportunity to upgrade the lighting. There is an upside to this – any mistakes I make are relatively short-lived – but also a downside. LEDs, many of which could last twenty years or more, wind up in a landfill when the store or office changes hands.

The modern home is no stranger to remodel and renovation, or to changing hands. We move from house to house far more rapidly than ever before as we change jobs, grow families, switch neighborhoods, and relocate. Yet, there may be a difference between residential change and commercial change. When a house changes hands, it rarely will see a change in its lighting. At home we expect lighting to last for fifty years, far longer than it might in a commercial setting. There is lighting in my current house that was installed before the previous owner, and locations have mostly stayed the same for a century. Unfortunately, this continuity and reliability is threatened by our current market approach.

A BETAMAX REALITY?

I can almost see the Sony executives cringe when their defunct Betamax video tapes are rolled out yet again as an analogy for outdated, legacy technologies. Many of you may have to google Betamax just to find out why these arguably higher-quality video tapes were swept under the rug of history by the humble VHS tape. Fill in your own more timely analogy, but this is simply a story of proprietary technology versus a more easily accessible standard.

In residential lighting, every onboard LED recessed light is another Betamax tape, something manufactured and provided by a single company. Every 6” recessed can from the 1980s is a VHS tape, widely available and easy to replace or repair.

Yesterday was easy. Every fixture took a bulb (yes, I know I mean lamp, but, in residential lighting, we call them what our clients call them – bulbs), and every bulb could be sourced from multiple manufacturers. If I bought an MR16 downlight from one company, I could buy a bulb from another. If the maker of my light fixture went out of business, it was not a big problem. Our solutions were endlessly upgradeable and maintainable. When I started my lighting career a couple of decades ago, I installed a few MR16 fixtures on my parents’ porch. They still work today, and I can still find replacement parts today.

Yet if I choose to specify a cutting-edge LED recessed downlight for my parents’ porch today, there is a high likelihood that I will not be able to get a replacement module for that fixture in twenty or thirty years when it fails. I convinced myself this was an acceptable reality because, in twenty years, there would be something so much better that I would happily rip out the fixture and put in something new. I am no longer convinced that this is the only way.

TIME FOR CHANGE

This article is the second in a series that I am writing with a singular goal of inspiring change. You can see why I think change is needed. Homeowners are forced to buy proprietary technology that will be outdated tomorrow and potentially irreplaceable at the end of its usable life. This is, quite simply, wasteful – and will add considerable waste to our landfills in the very near future.

But are we really ready for change in residential lighting? There has been change already – most homes are built with the cleverly named “canless recessed lights” that are really just compact, surface-mounted glare bombs that work well in closets and garages but are found in kitchens and bedrooms and too many other locations. This is not change for the better, though it may reduce the overall power consumption of a home, as it leaves our homes less comfortable and our bodies more disrupted.

A modern kitchen with indiscriminate general lighting that hurts our eyes and leaves counters dim.

Photography by Brady King

Here is a radical thought that only occurred to me as I prepared to write this article: the LED industry may be ready to graduate from college and start a career. In LED’s infancy and primary school years, rapid innovation and improvement resulted in constantly changing products. First, we specified CRI 80+ fixtures in homes. Then we hit 85. Then we moved to CRI 90. Now, we’re pushing 95+ CRI and moving into TM-30 readings.

When LEDs were in high school and college, generations of fixtures were measured in months instead of years or decades. Drivers steadily improved, and dimming dropped from ten percent to five and then to one percent or less. New optics captured light from COB sources, replacing the corn-cob approach and delivering better light. Efficiency improved, and improved, and improved again.

If we had established a “standard LED” ten years ago, we would regret it now. But today, we are in an entirely different situation. Perhaps today we could –as an industry – create a standard LED for residential construction.

Imagine this: we could join together and declare that every LED sold in residential lighting must be capable of 95 CRI, 3000°K light, and 1% dimming, or some other set of metrics that we collectively determine. Your light source could do more than the standard – it might also dim-to-warm, for example – but it would by design be capable of looking good in a room with fixtures from another manufacturer. That simply is not the case right now.

Is our industry mature enough to create a standard LED module size and base? Could we replace the Edison base with a new one with a clever name like the LEDison base? Could we imagine a future where I could buy a fixture from Brand X and a module from Brand Y and know they would work together?

ENORMOUS POTENTIAL

We have the capability to transform residential lighting so that we can pick up a replacement on the way home from work, avoid horrible lighting, and reduce waste in our landfills. We have the opportunity to transform residential lighting into something that benefits consumers instead of just minimizing construction costs.

In our homes – yours, mine, and those of our customers –there is a wide gulf of missed opportunity between glare-inducing lighting layouts and cost-prohibitive luxury lighting. There is a missing middle that leaves most of us with a four-cans-and-a-fan approach to lighting at best – and just the ceiling fan light kit at worst. In the August issue of DL, I called this third way “lighting hope.”

A designed kitchen with light right where it's needed most – and minimal glare or discomfort – requires an entirely different approach to lighting.

Photography by Matt Chashore

I want to encourage you to consider this new frontier and your role (as I consider my own) in perpetuating the gulf, even as you most likely sail its waters. I want to invite you to reconsider your business practices, design strategies, and technology decisions with one goal in mind: making the world a better place.

In the case of designing a better downlight for residential lighting, the only way to make this dream a reality is to work together. ■