Lighting Services Blog

Are your energy bills soaring month after month?  

According to the U.S. Energy Information Association, approximately 10% of all electricity used in commercial buildings in 2018 was for lighting. There are many reasons for this, but a couple of them include not using energy-efficient lighting, and leaving lights on when they aren't needed. 

You can lower your power bills and carbon footprint without lowering the lighting effect on your property.  This article looks at how the proper lighting, timers, sensors, photocells, and dimmers lower your energy usage.

In 2023, legislation will go into effect in the United States that will prohibit light bulbs with an energy efficiency of under 45 lumens per watt, which rules out most incandescent and halogen options commonly used today. This ban will mean it will no longer be legal to manufacture, import, or sell such bulbs. Instead, consumers will be encouraged to switch to more energy-efficient LED bulbs. Therefore, understanding the specifics of the upcoming ban and why LED lighting is better is essential.

Where you mount your lights is important. This gets complicated in places such as outdoor parking areas where there are no nearby walls to install lights on. This is where pole lights come in, and it's crucial to know as much as possible about pole lights before choosing the type to use. 

The lighting of warehouses, factories and other industrial buildings is sometimes ignored or given short shrift unless there is something obviously wrong with it. No outsiders regularly visit and you tend not to have clients to impress, so making the lighting all pretty doesn't seem necessary. However, a lighting upgrade is exactly the sort of change that could benefit an industrial business.  Here are a few ways that switching to LED lighting can help your company. 

     Maintaining a property means that you are responsible for making the place safe, attractive and functional, and a big part of achieving that is maintaining the system of light fixtures that keep your property illuminated.  Here are a few things you should know about your lights as time goes on and they begin to age.  

Owners of commercial properties across the country recognize that LED lighting is superior to traditional commercial lighting in terms of light quality and color rendering, and they are retrofitting LED lighting and reaping the benefits. LED lights are energy efficient and long-lasting, very affordable and emit very little heat, which in turn reduces HVAC loads. LED lighting upgrades and installations improve work-space and transitional lighting across a variety of commercial industries.

So many factors are involved each day that make up our business decisions. It's often easy to fall into a pattern of tunnel vision where only today's problems are concerned. Let's take a quick look at the two best reasons to look at upgrading your company to LED lighting now, instead of waiting until it becomes a problem.

According to safety regulations, your commercial building is required to have emergency exit lights indicating both emergency exit doors and the path to emergency exits if the route is not apparent. But installing your exit lights correctly is about more than just placement. Emergency exit lights need to function properly and safely even in situations where all other lights in the building fail. 

This is why most emergency exit lights are connected to a backup battery source that will last at least a few hours after power fails or is cut off in the building. Beyond power source, you should also think carefully about the materials used to build your emergency exit lights and the bulbs that illuminate the signs so that people in dangerous situations can clearly navigate their way to safety.

    Big businesses are always on the lookout for a good way to benefit their company, but they sometimes focus on the inside of their buildings to find them excluding the exterior. This is a problem when it comes to regular light maintenance and replacement. It skips the following advantages. 

Serious Money And Energy Savings  

    It's always a good time to think about replacing your current exterior lights. It can save you a lot of energy and money if you have old MH lights which can use up to 324 watts in your parking lot. Replacing just half of them with LED lights can cut your exterior's energy expenditure by up to 70%. You can imagine how much your electricity bill can drop after that considering that the US Energy Information Administration reports that the national average spent on electricity is 13.05 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

     Even if you don't replace your exterior and parking lot lighting with LEDs, keeping them maintained and regularly replaced reduces how much light is consumed and how efficiently that energy is used. Lights lose their oomph as they age, illuminating less over time. This is a waste of money since they consume energy at the same rate, but you can develop a schedule of replacing bulbs before they dim to keep their efficiency.

We've already spoken about how beneficial it is to switch to LED bulbs. LED lights slash utility bills and help you make less of an impact on the environment, what more incentive do you need? With that being said, making the switch all at once without knowing what you're getting into can be overwhelming, even expensive in some cases. If you're interested in LED lighting upgrades, here is some step by step advice.