Now That's a Lighting Job! Chicago Courthouse to Use 9,000 Hubbell Fixtures
Hubbell Lighting, Greenville, S.C., a division of Hubbell, Inc. (HUB-A), has recently begun a major lighting fixture installation at the Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in downtown Chicago that will contain 9,000 new fixtures, including 7,782 surface mounted and 1,318 recessed fluorescent lighting fixtures.
Working closely with the noted New York headquartered lighting design firm, Domingo Gonzalez and Associates (DGA), Hubbell Lighting's Columbia Lighting division crafted a custom 12-inch wide x 48-inch long surface-mounted fluorescent fixture and an 8-inch wide x 48-inch long recessed fluorescent fixture both built to the Gonzalez firm's specifications. The new fixtures include modified optics to improve energy efficiency, T8 lamps and dimming ballast technology. The glass lenses of the original design are being replaced with white parabolic baffles optimized for minimal glare but maximum lumen output.
The original lighting fixtures employed two 40W T12 lamps powered by magnetic ballasts. By comparison, the new energy-efficient Columbia replacement fixtures employ a single 32W T8 lamp powered by a Lutron Ecosystem electronic dimming ballast tuned to desired footcandle and energy levels. The T8 lamp is estimated to have a 40,000 hr. lamp life. Details
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Jim Lucy Blog
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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.