Earlier this year, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lighting Facts program launched a lighting specification tool that enables Distributor and Lighting Pro partners to search, filter and track products from its database of more than 50,000 LED products.
Lighting Facts facilitates adoption of solid-state lighting (SSL) by ensuing products are accurately represented on a level playing field. Manufacturers submit products, which are independently tested to verify product performance claims. Manufacturers then report performance data using the Lighting Facts label, which provides an at-a-glance view of major metrics such as light output, wattage, efficacy and color quality. Optional reported attributes include lumen maintenance and warranty.
Launched in 2008, Lighting Facts grew threefold in the past two years—a sign of LED lighting’s accelerating adoption. According to DOE, more than 40 percent of these products were listed in 2016, with an average 2,000 submitted every month. Currently, the database includes more than 50,000 LED lighting products from more than 1,400 manufacturers. As obsolete listings are archived, the database represents current commercially available products.
In 2015, DOE hosted a roundtable of lighting designers in Chicago to ask them how it could make the Lighting Facts database more useful to them. The designers stated they would benefit from being able to generate fixture schedules and uniform spec sheets, share product information with project team members, and interact with manufacturers and their sales reps. DOE responded by creating a new specification tool that allows lighting specifiers and distributors to search, filter and track Lighting Facts-listed products within a sharable workspace.
Using this tool, specifiers and distributors can filter products based on desired performance attributes, save products to a project or favorites list, tag products to projects, write project notes, interact with manufacturers about their products, assign products to a fixture schedule, and produce spec sheets and project summaries.
The Lighting Facts specification tool is available free to all Lighting Pro and Distributor partners of the program. The partner accesses it using their email address. Distributor partners pledge to ask their suppliers for the Lighting Facts label, verify that it is legitimate by comparing its information to that listed as LightingFacts.com/Products, use the label to evaluate products, and recommend Lighting Facts-listed products. Partners may use the Lighting Facts Partner Mark in their marketing within guidelines.
The Lighting Facts does not guarantee quality in a product. However, it does ensure lighting professionals can evaluate LED product performance that is accurate and represented in a simple format to enable quick evaluation and comparison. The Lighting Facts database itself provides a robust source of product. The specification tool now allows professionals to use this database in a way that makes their jobs easier.
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