You could be fooled into thinking that manufacturers have never seen a specification sheet from a lighting designer given that the information they provide online is extremely scant in the majority of cases.
Last week we were writing a detailed spec for a project which we want to be strictly adhered to.Neither of us had done a spec like this for a while(i.e.where the majority of it is in LED and normally completed by assistants!)and we were shocked at how little of the info we required was available online.
It took a lot of emails and phone calls to elicit the information that we required,some of which we would consider basic:does it dim;how does it dim;what are the dimensions of the transformer?
We thought that maybe we were out of touch and should know all these things or perhaps with age had come an unreasonable desire to cross the'T's and dot the'I's,but after chats with two other designers,we discovered that we are not alone in our frustration.
There are basic fields of information that are required to complete a strong,unbustable specification and all manufacturers should supply it as standard.
We decided to send our specs to the manufacturers in question to check they were correct(there are some crazy ordering systems out there)and for help in filling in the blanks.
Most responses were average,some were helpful,some were useless and some pulled out all the stops.XAL and ERCO were top of the leader board but it seems back-to-front logic that a designer should have to go to such lengths to specify the products that manufacturers want to sell.
If anyone wants to come to us for a full list of specification fields,they are very welcome.
