If you’re searching for a way to control your lighting from anywhere and without flipping a switch, Wi-Fi LED lights are the perfect products. With a Wi-Fi LED Controller Hub, you can control compatible LED bulbs, LED flood lights, and LED strip lights with your Android or iOS-enabled smartphone or tablet. The Milight 3.0 app, along with a Wi-Fi compatible controller when necessary—allows you to power lights on and off, control multiple zones of lights, select from thousands of colors, choose from various single-color and color changing modes, and control brightness and speed.

Wi-Fi compatible flood lights are great for landscape lighting, tree uplighting, architectural wall washing, and other outdoor applications. These LED landscape lights are available in 30- and 50-watt versions and have separate LEDs for either white or colorful illumination. They plug into a standard 3-prong outlet and can be easily connected to a Wi-Fi hub. Connect multiple lights to the hub, and synchronize their color, brightness, or mode with your smartphone or tablet.

Nearly every single person living in the United States relies on the electrical grid. It's how electricity gets from the power plant to your home, powering your devices and appliances. With no grid, none of the electrical work in your home will function – no television, no air conditioning and no electric lights. Our grid is changing, however, taking advantage of evolving technology on both the distribution and consumer side of the equation. Read on to learn more about how our electrical grid will evolve to meets the needs of the 21st century.

How to Balance Supply and Demand

The electrical grid is not a single object, but rather a giant network of power plants and transmission lines that spans the entire nation. In order for electricity to flow from the generating stations into your home’s electrical work, the grid needs to be able to meet the demand at any given time and place. This can be an enormous challenge – if there is too little production, consumers can be subject to annoying and damaging brownouts. Ramping up generation to meet variable demand is expensive and inefficient, however.

Some utilities solve the problem with time-of-day pricing, charging more during the day and less at night to smooth out demand. Smart technology, however, will allow us to fine-tune the grid even further to increase efficiency, improve communication and mitigate blackouts or other power outages.

Smart Meters and Dispersed Generation

Smart meters are one of the first steps toward our new grid. These meters track residential electrical consumption in real time and can communicate with the utility company instantaneously. They can allow producers to better predict demand, respond immediately to dips and spikes, and further refine variable pricing structures that incentivize people to use less electricity during peak hours. Smart meters also give homeowners the power to see where and when they are putting the most stress on their electrical work, allowing them to adjust their behavior strategically.

Changes are coming to the generation side as well. Traditionally, the electrical grid is powered by large, centralized power plants, but residential solar installations mean that generation is becoming more widely distributed. Wind generation is also becoming an ever-larger factor in our nation's energy supply. This means that the grid needs to be updated to become more flexible and adaptable, but there is a large payoff in sight – the more dispersed that power generation becomes, the more resilient the grid will be in the event of an outage, with smaller regions able to supply themselves with emergency power if they are cut off from the centralized system.

Makes Tomorrow's Energy Grid Work for You

No one knows exactly what the power grid will look like 100 years from now, but the nation is well on its way to updating its electrical infrastructure to meet the needs of this century. If you have any concerns about how your electrical work will interface with the power grid of the future, or need any other work done on the wiring and circuitry in your home, call an expert electrician today.

A lot of time we are asked what is the equivalent LED product to convert from Metal Halide, High Pressure Sodium or Mercury Vapor. And a lot of time, we have a product in mind that works based on past experience. But how did we come up with that product, and how did we make the original decision on what was the proper replacement?

There’s a lot of science that goes into light, color, quality, and each light had it’s own characteristics. For example, it takes less LED to replace High Pressure Sodium than it takes to replace Metal Halide. And we are talking a lot more than just lumens. We are talking about color temperature, quality of light and something called photopic / scotopic lumens.

In the world of lighting, we measure foot candles with a light meter, this is called a photopic measurement. The light meter picks up everything, including spectrum’s that are invisible to us. Now, we humans see things to, and this is called scotopic lumens. Our rods and cones read and interpret light. And it does so differently than what a light meter does. So it is not uncommon when we demo a LED Light against a HPS light or Metal Halide, we first ask “Which is brighter” before we show the light meter reading. It leaves a few people scratching their heads. Well, that’s the science of of it all, and fortunately there is some handy tables called SP ratios that allow us to take the lumens of a particular light (photopic lumens) and multiply it by the S/P ratio to get the scotopic lumens equivalent.

For example, the S/P ratio for High Pressure Sodium is 0.40. The S/P ratio for LED at 5000K is 1.8. So if you take 40,000 lumens of HPS and multiply it 0.4, the effective scotopic lumens is 16,000. To get the same amount of lumens from LED, take the 16,000 and divide it by the S/P ratio and you get 8888 lumens. So the 8888 lumens of LED is the photopic measurement, the 16,000 LED lumens is the scotopic lumens measurement. So in an nutshell, you need 8,888 lumens of LED to replace 40,000 lumens of HPS from a scotopic point of view.

Here is a handy chart of common lights and ratios for you to use.