Get A Grip On Lighting Podcast

Sunset Lighting has been in the business for thirty years. And it’s current VP of operations and this week’s guest, Kyle Landig has been working there since he was in high school. Our friendly banter passes through working specifically in retail spaces - building a business to be a right fit for the client, staffing at all hours, working with people who care more about color quality than anything...

When is a clock not a clock? When it’s acting as an analog display for network time. Mark Higgason of Encompass AV is on the show to discuss how changes in Power over Ethernet regulation is opening up more applications in this section of the Internet of Things. We speak with him about scalability, how businesses are adopting PoE applications, the granularity of control available for these systems,...

A rare four person episode this week as we are joined by Sanjeev Thakkar and Steve Holman of Xeleum, an Eiko Company. We discuss their XiFi protocol, the functions it offers, and how interoperable their products are with other systems. After that we step back into talking about the previous booms in controls, moving beyond controls as a venue energy savings, and the heart of the Internet of Things...

Our excursion into augmented reality and biophilic design with Cree Lighting’s Kory Liszt. He’s an inventor and the designer of the Cadient luminaire, because we can’t get this piece of hardware out of our heads. Our conversation with Kory starts with bringing bits of the outdoors in to make people feel better, using light as a dynamic element in how you experience a room. We do get into the speci...

This week we’re taking circadian research from the conference hall to the order desk with Cree Lighting’s Shirley Coyle. We chat about WELL building standards, better ways to light interiors, preferences getting in the way of doing people good, and moving past efficiency concerns. The real impetus for this conversation was CREE’s Cadient fixture, it’s a dynamic skylight alternative that replicates...

This week we sit down with Brian Brandes, Senior VP of Product Development at Satco and this episode really is about the nuts and bolts of his job. We talk about end-to-end projects, market research, the creation of Nuvo, fashion in luminaires, the long-term future of legacy and poetry. In an industry where LED continues to find new ways to be a disruptor, the only real solution is to do the right...

CBC Lighting’s Abraham Schnitzler visited Michael in-studio to talk about some good old fashioned lighting distribution. We get into the legacy marketplace, driver availability, California standards, trade wars, and municipal retrofits. Abraham, Greg, and Michael swap stories about condo applications, the detective work that goes into quoting, customer service, and the value of business associatio...

Wishing a warm welcome back and a heartfelt congratulations to Spencer and John; the first for returning to the show as guests, the second for gaining ownership of Pacific Lamp and Supply. In this chat we dig into how job title changes aren’t really changing their responsibilities or relationship with each other. After that we get into changing times, growing into online sales interactions and kee...

This time around we have a quick bonus episode with Randy Reid, editor of The Edison Report and executive director of The National Lighting Bureau to discuss the upcoming NAILD Convention’s recently announced itinerary, the first ever Tesla Awards, and the NLB’s Trusted Warranty program.

J Marshall Hunt is a man with a plan plan to reach contractors by being better than the ‘big guys.’ But in order to prove that fact, he has to be on their radar. J explains a few of his secrets in segmented marketing and narrowly targeted web campaigns, plus his youtube series Watt’s New with J. The conversation also spends a lot of time on the corporate culture he’s built on the power of gratitud...

After a tour of Satco’s warehouse we have concluded that they have everything. No really, everything a lighting dork could ask for is one of their many shelves. Beyond offering a tour, Bill Gildin did join us for a recording session to talk about the history of the company, how their share of the legacy support market has grown even as demand has fallen and how that support has become a value add...

Christopher Preston is an environmental philosopher and author, we found him when an excerpt from his book The Synthetic Age about how animals are evolving to use the growing levels of electric light present at night, we had to get him on the show. We get into human scale versus geological scale problem, the case of interference in natural selection, the varying weights of obligation to do better...

Margaret Wong got started in the business 36 years ago with a single extension cord. She got that Chinese-made cord listed by UL, a first in the field, and the rest is history. This episode features discussions of Hong Kong then and now, doing missionary work for capitalism, worker culture in China, and a potential paradigm shift global economics. We also delve into McWong’s future, advocating for...

From the floor of Horticann in Denver, we met up with Rebate Guru, Juan Carlos Blacker to talk about lighting in horticulture space. The space is very different from the rest of the field because light isn’t a tool for sight it’s a means of production; which makes it simple to tackle - sell bulbs that generate the most crop. We also get into how indoor growing facilities are created, their particu...

The showroom at City Lights in San Francisco has changed a fair bit over the last decade - the shelf space for replacement bulbs has steadily shrunk, while the number of fixtures on display has grown by leaps and bounds. There’s a lot of tradeoffs between purpose-built LED luminaires and something more modular. Michael, Greg, and our guests this episode get into the tradeoffs between treating ligh...

2019 was a great year for us. We have learned so much and met so many interesting people from all corners of our industry. We’re just going to take a few minutes to reflect on all that. Thank you for watching, listening, leaving comments, writing emails, and telling other people about all this. There’s still a pair of short episodes ready for 2019, but we’ve got big things coming in 2020 (name pen...

California is leading the way, not only as an economic powerhouse, but for energy regulations as well. In our Discussion with MJ Paul at Omega Pacific we got into the end of rebates, how to get out of electrical supply by focusing on lighting distribution, and keeping the start-up mentality 30 years into a company’s life cycle. As we continued our chat we got into the particulars of working the ba...

The fact of the matter is that controls aren’t guaranteed to generate savings. There’s a number of reasons for this; the space is always occupied, the control mechanisms themselves draw too much energy, or people who might flip a switch end up letting the sensor do the work and lamps run for 5 minutes longer than they have to. But that’s okay (mostly), because Lighting Wizard, Stan Walerczyk is ba...

Brian Stern and Webb Lawrence of the LED Supply Co in Denver came to lighting after working in IT and radio respectively. They jumped in by dealing in to the local cannabis market, before abandoning that space outright for the opportunities of ‘regular’ retrofit business, and also not having to compete with HPS’s stranglehold on indoor horticulture. In this episode, they chat about creating value...

Eric Myklebust believes each building can be its own power grid. When asked why that might be necessary he will not cop to believing in the end of days that is the climate crisis. Talking about the facts of the matter, as opposed to projections; we can say for sure that less pollution is a good thing, solar panels can be very useful to that end. But the hurdle to green energy isn’t storage, it’s i...

Neil Mattson, PhD, is a professor at Cornell’s School of Integrative Plant Science, a greenhouse extension specialist, and this episode’s guest. Joining Michael and Greg from the floor of HortiCann in Denver, we start our chat with the cyclical attempts LEDs have made at breaking into this field, and how maybe this is the time they dethrone high-pressure sodium lamps, even it means rebuilding a bu...

This week’s guest thinks what we do is too simple, nevermind the two years and a hundred podcast episodes, Mark Marmer does his work in design and build contracts for electric vehicle charging stations for condominiums. Our chat with him talks about the paradigm shift that electric cars represent, especially as driving becomes automated, but also working a contract start to finish over bidding to...

Jessica Collier of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is fresh off her award-winning thesis and right onto the Get a Grip on Lighting Podcast to share her work in color preference under electric light. She’s building up a library of descriptive tags based on the IES’ TM30 specification, so that vendors and consumers won’t be left in the dark when it comes to all the metrics on the side of a...

On the floor of Nalmco’s Convention in Minneapolis we met up with two of its directors, Bill Sgro and Scott Mendelsohn, to talk about the generational aspect of our industry and the value of networking at conventions like these. We also get into the incentive bubble, the future of what we’ll be making and selling as IoT adoption reaches a tipping point, current challenges and foreseeable problems....

Stan Walerczyk has done everything in the lighting business, but today he’s here to talk about the color blue. Specifically, he wants to talk about the 480 nanometer wavelength and how it figures into spectrally-enhanced, blue-enriched lighting for human performance. As a member of the Human-Centric Lighting Society he spends most of him trying to research how high kelvin temperatures can be used...