The impact of EPACT on reflector lamp replacements

The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPACT) requires that manufacturers stop manufacturing and distributing some very commonly used fluorescent and incandescent lamps after October 31, 1995. Consequentially, when end users are faced with replacing standard reflector (R) and parabolic aluminized reflector (PAR) lamps, their alternatives will be limited to those that comply with EPACT. Confusion is likely to occur when users try to understand how the available alternatives would perform compared with the original lamp. This paper discusses a research study that was conducted to evaluate manufacturer-recommended equivalents for 150 Watt PAR38 flood and spot lamps, and 75 Watt R30 flood and spot base case lamps. The photometric performance and visual beam distribution of 58 lamp types from seven manufacturers, a total of 211 lamps, were evaluated. The results indicate that halogen and krypton-filled equivalents performed as well as, or better than, the base case lamps. Compact fluorescent reflector lamps, however, did not perform as well. The evaluations identified seven categories of beam distributions that represent the beam distributions of the base case lamps and their equivalents. Most of the base case lamps had smooth beam distributions; however, many of the recommended replacements did not