An Overview of HID Lighting

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HID lighting at Fenway Park in Boston.

Three recent columns provided a brief history of lighting, an overview of fluorescent technology, and a look at the challenges of improving streetlights. Following a side trip into the issue of "passive survivability," I'm returning this week to illumination with an overview of high-intensity discharge (HID) lighting.

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Making Houses Resilient to Power Outages

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Some homes in New Orleans were without power for months as a result of hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The ice storm a week-and-a-half ago illustrated, all too clearly, the vulnerability of our homes. Hundreds of thousands of homes in New England lost power in the storm, which deposited up to an inch of ice on trees the night of December 11th, and tens of thousands were still without power a full week later, despite heroic efforts by utility crews.

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Mercury Vapor Lighting

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Mercury vapor light. Mercury vapor is the oldest type of high-intensity discharge (HID) lighting.

Last week we took a look at fluorescent lighting, which is dramatically reducing our energy use for illuminating indoor spaces. This week we'll cover mercury vapor lighting, which is the most common outdoor lighting in many of our towns.

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A Look at Fluorescent Lighting

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Fluorescent lamps have electrodes at both ends of a phosphor-coated, sealed glass tube that is filled with a small amount of mercury vapor in an inert gas, usually argon.

Last week, after an overview of lighting history, we examined incandescent lighting--the lamp technology invented by Thomas Edison. Until the mid-1900s incandescent lighting dominated both commercial and residential lighting applications, indoors and outdoors.

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Touring the Greenbuild Expo with CNN

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I'm not usually all that comfortable in front of a camera, but I had fun walking the Greenbuild 2008 Expo floor with a video crew from CNNMoney.com and Fortune magazine. We focused on four or five technologies in our tour, only two of which made it into the final two minute video (after a nice lead-in by Scot Horst of 7group). The CNN crew were looking for photogenic presentations, while I was looking for products I believe in to talk about.

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Exploding Low-Flow Toilets

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In 1997, humorist Dave Barry wrote a newspaper piece titled "The Toilet Police," about those newly mandated 1.6-gallon low-flow toilets that honestly and truly deserved to be dumped on. The column is still floating around the internet, and clearly people are still moved by it. But, y'know, that was over a decade ago. There are still crappy toilets to be had, just like there are lousy products of all sorts readily available, but smart toilet makers have strained to get the kinks out to the point that a one-gallon flush can outperform some of those old three-and-a-half-gallon water-hogs.

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