We’ve built our entire lives, our homes, our stores, our places of work, around the solid fact of reliable, indoor lighting. No one would be surprised to hear that lighting is essential. But lighting a space is more than just making sure your customers aren’t bumping into walls or tripping over displays. The lighting you choose says a lot about what you sell and how much people are willing to pay for it. Check out this recent post for another discussion about retail lighting . Choosing the right lighting for your store goes beyond just color temperature. The lamps and fixtures themselves, and the quality of the light they produce prime your customers for what to expect in your store. Similar to how dim, low quality lighting can make a prospective renter less likely to choose your apartment when considering where to live; old, harsh, poorly maintained lighting tells your customers your merchandise isn’t (or shouldn’t be) very expensive. Walking into a Wal-Mart, Salvation Army, or other discount store, customers are often met with this harsh, inexpensive looking light. Part of these stores’ business model is keeping overhead costs low in order to sell products at lower price points and still turn enough profit to stay in business. Wal-Mart can afford to retrofit all their stores with new, efficient LEDs of course. But the Salvation Army, Goodwill, or your local Village Discount Outlet might not. While it may be more expensive to continue to operate those harsh, failing fluorescent tubes, the upfront cost associated with upgrading them might not be possible. What it comes down to is people unconsciously associate this less-than-optimal lighting with inexpensive goods. Imagine going into a store like Balenciaga or even a Starbucks that’s lit like Wal-Mart. That jacket or pair of shoes will look even more expensive and out of place, and the price for that cup of coffee may even feel like too much to spend. Similarly, people associate high quality lighting with more expensive goods. High-end stores and boutiques set the mood for the prices you’ll encounter from the outset. Carefully chosen displays with just the right accent lights, classy pendant lights with Edison-style LED bulbs, Recessed can lights, track lighting, LED strips under shelves, all these elements are carefully chosen and crafted to set the tone and drive sales. Color temperature and CRI also have a lot to do with setting the mood in your store. High quality lighting with higher CRI scores and the right color temperature can make all the difference. Flat, daylight panel lights can work well for big-box and discount retailers, but varied lighting in your store can be the difference between making sales and seeing people turn around just inside your door. HardWire Lighting has decades of experience retrofitting all kinds of commercial spaces with LED lighting. Contact us today for your free consultation .

There are things that we fully intend to get around to doing. I’m going to clean the gutters. Take out the trash. Return that phone call. I really am going to do them! ...Eventually. And that’s how most businesses and individuals approach upgrading their lighting. It feels daunting and, let’s face it, it feels like something that can wait. Well there are very good reasons beyond just the energy savings why waiting is not advisable. Admittedly a single household is going to see fewer of these benefits, or not notice them as much as a larger installation will. However, if you’re responsible for a multifamily building, commercial installation, warehouse, or even an large-scale industrial building, you’re going to benefit, and substantially, from upgrading to LED sooner rather than later. Energy cost The first, and most easily measurable thing to consider is the energy savings from upgrading to LED. Traditional light sources especially incandescents and halogens are up to 90 percent less efficient than LEDs. The best way to illustrate this is to take a look at how much energy your current lighting is using, what that’s costing you, and then comparing that to what replacement LEDs would cost to operate for those same fixtures. There’s a relatively simple way to figure this out. [Total watts of lighting] X [Total hours operated] / 1000 = Total energy used over a time period (in kWh) For example, if you were to run 100 light fixtures that use a 60W incandescent bulb for 10 hours a day during a 30 day month, your total watts would be 6000W and your total hours would be 300. 6000 watts x 300 hours / 1000 = 1800 kWh of electricity. A good national average electricity cost is $0.11 per kWh. That one month of electricity using incandescent bulbs is going to cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $198. Upgrading to a 60W equivalent LED bulb, which only draws 9W of electricity to achieve the same illumination, you could cut that cost to around $30 for that same month-long period. Everyone’s individual situation is different of course, but just looking at these numbers it’s easy to see how the cost of waiting to upgrade compounds with every month that goes by. HVAC costs Traditional lighting, especially incandescents, are extremely efficient...at producing heat. As small space heaters, they’re great. As light sources, they leave a lot to be desired. What it comes down to is that running a fair amount of incandescent and especially halogen bulbs in an enclosed space can cause the room to heat up by a not-insignificant amount. That may not be the worst thing in the winter months in colder climates, but during the warmer months that extra heat taxes any air conditioning system you may have running. Believe it or not there’s a relatively easy way to calculate how much you’re taxing your HVAC to offset the cost of running your antiquated, inefficient light bulbs. I say relatively easy, because it does require you to do some leg work to get the variables worked out, but the formulae aren’t terribly complex. Let’s go through the exercise using our example above. In our first example, you were using 1800 kWh per month to power those 100 incandescent fixtures. By switching to LED, you’d be using about 270 kWh for those same bulbs over that same 30-day period. That’s an energy savings of 1530 kWh. If you multiply that by 12 months, you get 18,360 kWh savings per year. These numbers are getting pretty big. We initially said we were running 100 bulbs, let’s take our energy savings total, and divide it by 100 to get the per-bulb savings. Annually, we’re saving 183.6 kWh per bulb by switching from a standard A19 60W bulb to a 9W LED equivalent. A good estimate of price per kWh is about $0.11. If we plug in our variables: 183.6 (kWh savings) x $0.11 (cost per kWh) = $20.20 annual savings per bulb. Multiply that by our 100 bulbs, and you get $2,020 in savings just on the cost of running the bulbs alone. Next we’ll need to know how many months we’re typically going to be running air conditioners. Assuming we’re in a place like Chicago with temperate but fluctuating temperatures, you’ll be running A/C units for about 4.6 months out of the year, which comes out to 38.33% of the year. Using these numbers along with the ASHRAE rule of thumb, which states that 30 to 35 watts of cooling is required to offset the heat output for every 100 watts used to light a space, we can calculate how much energy it would take to cool the space just to offset the higher wattage lighting. We’ll stick with the same $0.11 per kWh for the purposes of figuring out our savings. 183.6 wWh (annual savings per bulb) x 38.33 (percent of year for cooling) x .33 (ASHRAE rule) = 23.22 (kWh of HVAC energy savings per year) 23.22 wWh savings x $0.11 per kWh = $2.55 saved per bulb per year Granted, $2.55 per bulb per year doesn’t sound like too much. But in our example we were running 100 bulbs, which brings that total to $250 per year in savings. That’s basically free money you’re getting back in cooling costs. Maintenance costs It’s difficult to do any kind of calculations here to figure out maintenance costs since every building, company, and installation is different. However, it’s not uncommon to require some kind of equipment rental to change expired bulbs. Whether those are specialized lifts or trucks or whatever other means are required to reach those out-of-the-way bulbs. There’s also the labor cost of having someone take the time to find the replacement, get a ladder, change out the bulb, return the later, etc. These costs (and their frequency) should be factored into your savings as well. Material costs HardWire’s LED bulbs last much, much longer than traditional incandescents. In fact, HardWire’s A19 LEDs have an expected lifespan of 15,000 hours. Couple that ultra-long lifespan with HardWire’s 10-year warranty, and there should be no need to replace bulbs for many years. Additional considerations There are some unquantifiable “soft” costs to not upgrading to LED. Namely, lighting quality and its effect on your customers. As we discussed in this article, your lighting has an effect on your customers whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Not upgrading to LED and running lower-quality lighting longer than necessary can have a real, if difficult to specify, negative impact on your sales and customer satisfaction. Upgrading to LED can drastically improve your lighting quality, reduce your costs, and, in some cases, reduce the number of fixtures you need to achieve the same, or even better, lighting coverage. If you’re ready to upgrade your lighting, contact us for a free consultation .

Typically when people think of upgrading their lighting to LED, the first thought is just replacing all the existing incandescent or halogen or fluorescent bulbs with LED equivalents. That works and is a great first step. It will certainly save you money over running your existing bulbs. But here’s what most lighting companies won’t tell you: it’s probably overkill. Incandescent lights are hugely wasteful. Up to 95 percent of all the energy they consume can be lost to heat. Fluorescents and CFLs were an improvement but they are still less efficient and less versatile than LEDs. When most lighting fixtures were installed, especially in older buildings, they were set up for what people had at the time. Namely, inefficient incandescents and fluorescents. Fixtures were numerous and spaced closely together. You needed the quantity because the quality just wasn’t there. Often you’ll hear people talk about how much brighter LEDs are and how they need to dim them because they overpower the space. That’s not the LED’s fault. We’ve been conditioned to expect less from our light sources. If you replace every single incandescent bulb with an equivalent LED, you’re likely going to find the space is much brighter than you’re used to. There are two common-sense solutions to this problem: the first is to simply dim the LEDs and run them at less than their optimum capacity. The other is to replace 60W bulbs with 40W equivalent LEDs in the color temperature you’re looking for. That will give you a dimmer light with an even better wattage and lower cost than you’re used to. But there’s another solution: reconsider the number of fixtures you have. Not only will this allow you to use the higher-powered bulbs at their full capacity, but it will ultimately save even more on energy bills by reducing the number of lights running at any given time. Of course, the reason this is possible is not just efficiency and while there are many differences between LEDs and traditional bulbs, one of the biggest is directionality. A standard incandescent bulb emits light in all directions. Specialty bulbs have reflectors and are shaped in various ways to capture and redirect the light that otherwise would be lost inside the bulb or in a fixture. LEDs don’t require these additional features. The light an LED emits can be directed exactly where the engineers want. They can mimic traditional bulbs while using much less energy and wasting much less light. The result is a bulb that operates at a fraction of the cost, requires very little maintenance, and focuses more light into the space than could previously have been achieved. HardWire’s professional electricians can help plan your space with LEDs in mind, getting the best light with the most modern bulbs. There are high-quality LEDs for nearly any indoor, outdoor, residential, or commercial application. Plus, HardWire offers an industry-leading 5-year warranty on all installations. Contact us today for a free consultation .

Many of the discussions about LEDs eventually come back to energy and cost savings. Of course energy savings are important at the global level, but cost savings are likely what matter more to you as an individual on a monthly basis. But just how much cost savings are there between fluorescent tubes and their LED equivalents? This brings to mind the sunk cost fallacy. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, the idea is essentially this: sunk costs do, in fact, influence people's decisions, with people believing that investments (i.e., sunk costs) justify further expenditures. People demonstrate "a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made.” This is the sunk cost fallacy, and such behavior may be described as "throwing good money after bad,” while refusing to succumb to what may be described as "cutting one's losses.” Often facilities with a large number of fluorescent tube light fixtures have sunk a decent amount of money into replacement tubes. After all, tubes begin to flicker, hum, and get dimmer with time. Better to have a stock of replacements on hand than purchase individual tubes as each one needs to be replaced. After all, buying in bulk is often a good way to save money up front. Have you found yourself advocating for upgrading to LED fixtures while the number crunchers tell you it would be best to use what materials you already have? What if you could prove to them you could crunch numbers just as hard? That’s where we come in. It’s very likely that in this situation, the accountants are succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. Up-front investment in a stock of perfectly good fluorescent tubes seems to justify the cost of electricity that it will take to keep them running until the stock is depleted and a different, more energy efficient, solution can be considered. On the surface it sounds good. But dig in a little and you’ll find that the more quickly your facility switches to LED tubes and away from fluorescents, the better. You’ll start seeing energy cost savings from the first day of switching to LEDs from fluorescent tubes. But how long would it take to pay for the LED upgrade while also covering the cost of the unused stock of replacement fluorescents? To get to that answer, we’ll have to go through a few different steps and consider a few different variables. We’ll make some assumptions as well. Obviously your specific situation may differ, but swap out my figures for yours and you’ll get a good sense of how long it will take you to recoup the cost of an LED tube upgrade. In the example below we assume you have 5 cases of T8 fluorescent tubes in stock. The cost comes from a sample of a handful of different retailers online all selling the same product.

One of the most common complaints regarding LEDs has historically been that they are “too bright.” The first generations of LEDs were fairly crude and emitted somewhat harsh, bright white light that wasn’t terribly high quality and didn’t mimic what we as a society had become accustomed to over generations of living with incandescent lights. LEDs have come a very long way even in the past few years and they now rival incandescents’ quality while being simultaneously much more energy efficient.  Even with these advances it’s possible that the LED bulb you bought to replace your defunct incandescent is much brighter than what you were expecting even if it has the same equivalent wattage. Most of us are used to associating wattage with brightness. That has traditionally been the way bulb manufacturers measured or approximated the light a given bulb would emit. A 40-watt bulb emits much less light than a 100-watt bulb, for example. LEDs deal with equivalent wattage, an approximation of what you could expect if the LED were an incandescent. So a 9-watt LED may be “equivalent” to a 60-watt incandescent while using much less energy and, potentially, producing quite a bit more light. A better, more direct way to measure light is using lumens.

California is the most populous state in the nation with nearly 38 million inhabitants. As such it wields a lot of power both politically and economically. It is also one of the most progressive states when it comes to consumer protection legislation. So when California passes a law that affects some commercial product, manufacturers often have two choices: refuse to comply and stop selling their products in California, or comply with the new regulations to keep their market share.  It’s often far too difficult and costly for a manufacturer to research, develop, and implement the new changes to the product, change an entire production line, and still keep the old, un-optimized product at the same time. It’s much more cost effective to completely phase out the old product than keep two parallel products in operation. We saw this with the automotive companies recently. California pushed out new fuel efficiency standards and suddenly all consumer vehicles across the board became more fuel efficient. It’s hard to lose out on 38 million potential customers, especially when your competitors are ready to rush in and scoop them up. The same thing happened with California’s Title 20 legislation which went into effect in January 2010. The legislation aimed to increase efficiency standards for various items including light bulbs by 2018. New provisions went into effect in 2020 and manufacturers have been working diligently to comply with the new standards. Effective January 1, 2020, the California Energy Commission added a regulation that requires general service lamps (GSL) to have a minimum efficacy of 45 lumens per watt. The vast majority of products HardWire uses are Title 20 compliant and will say as much in the product descriptions. Below we outline some of the more salient particulars of Title 20 and what standards manufacturers’ products must meet in order to comply with the legislation.

Fluorescent tubes have been a staple of office life for decades. And the flickering, humming, and eyestrain they cause have been with us just as long. While it’s true that fluorescents use much less energy than incandescents, they are still less energy-efficient than modern LEDs. Just the ballasts they require to function account for upwards of 10 percent of the energy they require to function.  One quick way to reduce overhead costs in your commercial office space is by upgrading your existing fluorescent fixtures to much more energy-efficient LEDs. If you’re reading this, you’re probably most of the way to being convinced this is the direction you want to go. Great! But where do you start? Unless you have the budget to upgrade all your fixtures at once (which is ideal but not always the case) you’ll need a plan of attack. In this article we’ll be discussing how we at HardWire recommend going about these types of phased upgrades to your lighting. The first place you should look to upgrade is anywhere you have linear fluorescent tubes burning 24 hours a day. These areas are typically outside the main areas of the building and could include parking garages, stairwells, the basement, utility rooms, etc. When you think of fluorescent lights in an office setting, you likely picture the standard 2x4 troffer. They may have plastic lenses, a mirrored “louvered” grid, or the bulbs could be housed in a higher-end looking basket for less direct light. However they’re constructed, they’re one of the most ubiquitous fixtures in any office space.

When a bulb burns out in your kitchen or dining room, it’s often a quick fix. Get a stepstool, find a replacement bulb, unscrew one, screw in the other, and you’re all set. Well what if your ceiling isn’t just eight or 12 feet up? What if your ceiling is more like 140 feet up? A typical ladder isn’t going to cut it. And you’re probably not going to go up there for every individual bulb that burns out. This was the problem facing a lot of sports and entertainment complexes before the advent of reliable, long-lasting, and energy efficient LED lighting. Lighting efficiency is a big deal for these enormous venues that burn thousands of individual, high-powered bulbs at a time for hours on end. Rarely are they burning 24-hours a day, but certainly for multiple hours a few days per week. And the energy required to get those incandescent bulbs to burn as brightly as they do can drive up energy bills. In recent years LED technology has advanced to the point where they are bright and dependable enough to be serious contenders for replacing the lights these venues traditionally relied upon. In general LEDs have a much longer expected lifespan than their incandescent counterparts. This helps drive down the maintenance cost of replacing metal halide bulbs that inevitably burn out. Changing lights in a venue of this size requires special lifts that won’t damage the playing surface, requires specially trained and often union labor, and getting all that in place for a single burnt out bulb often doesn’t make sense. So you either have to change all the bulbs when one goes as a preventative measure, or you wait for a certain number to fail before incurring the cost of replacing them. Either way you’re compromising on cost or lighting quality. LEDs’ longer lifespan can significantly reduce the number of times someone has to get onto a lift and ascend 140 feet in the air to change out these specialized, expensive fixtures. Not only do LEDs last much longer than traditional lamps, they also require nearly no time to “warm” to their full brightness. Whereas sodium-HID lamps, those traditionally used in these areas in the past, require time to actually heat up, LEDs have what amounts to instant-on capabilities. Had the Superdome utilized LEDs in 2013 during Super Bowl XLVII, the power outage that left the stadium in the dark for more than half an hour would have had less of an impact on the game. While the LEDs wouldn’t have addressed the underlying issue of the power outage, once the power was restored 10 minutes after the outage, LEDs would have snapped back to life. Unfortunately sodium-HID lamps require about 25 minutes to warm up, delaying the most watched sporting event in the United States by more than 30 minutes. Power outages for arenas of this side are admittedly rare, but in general requiring lamps to warm up for nearly 30 minutes is 30 minutes LEDs wouldn’t be burning. That’s 30 minutes of energy savings before every event and that adds up. Speaking of energy savings, it goes without saying that LEDs use less energy than a sodium-HID or high pressure sodium (HPS) bulb. So energy costs will be lower as a matter of course. Similarly the energy draw will be lower. So while it may cost more initially to retrofit all the fixtures and update them to LED, by working with your electricity provider, custom rebates or other incentives could likely be available. One element we haven’t touched on when it comes to stadium and arena lighting is the color rendering index (CRI). We’ve discussed CRI and why it matters before . We’ve also talked about getting better light with fewer lumens . Both these elements come into play when discussing the benefits of LEDs for arena lighting. While it’s rare for an LED lamp to score less than 70, HPS lights have a CRI of less than 30. This is abysmal in terms of color rendering. The only way to compensate for that terrible CRI score is to flood the space with more lumens. That means more lights, more energy, and more cost. Replacing these old, inefficient HPS bulbs with high-intensity LEDs can drastically reduce energy consumption and cost while also raising the CRI score significantly. The best example of a new construction of this scale taking LEDs and natural light into account from the very beginning is US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. The stadium boasts the world’s largest ETFE transparent roof which lets in natural sunlight and reduces the need for artificial lighting during daytime. It also uses thousands of advanced LEDs, cutting energy consumption by approximately 75% over metal halide lamps.

A lot goes into setting up or renovating a retail location. There are displays for merchandise, flooring, wall treatments, eye-catching artwork or promotional materials, and myriad other considerations. As we’ve discussed previously , lighting is very important to your customers’ experience and can set their expectations for your store, your inventory, and even what seem to be reasonable prices for what you’re offering. In this previous post , we discussed different types of retail lighting. We’ve also discussed some common mistakes in retail lighting that can undo all the hard work of a renovation or establishing a new store. In this article we’ll dive a little more deeply into one of these mistakes: neglecting to properly position your accent lighting. And, more importantly, talk about how to correct that. It’s easy to overlook something like accent lighting. Lights are one of the first things to go in when doing a build or renovation. And accent lighting should be one of the last things positioned, as it will need to be adjusted based upon the item or display it’s meant to call attention to. What follows are a few quick steps to ensure that your lighting is properly positioned.