Want to save some money on your monthly electric bill? Change out your standard incandescent light bulbs with more efficient Compact Fluorescent Lamps (known industry wide as CFL’s). It’s a simple and quick way to reduce your lighting costs, but is it “Greener”?

CFL’s are more efficient, and therefore use less power than a standard incandescent light bulb, and they also last a lot longer. On the surface of the issue you would think that reducing power used is definitely “Greener”, but what do you do with the CFL’s when they do finally burn out? If you just throw them away like a standard incandescent lamp, you are not helping the environment at all.

When fluorescent lamps (not just CFL’s but also linear fluorescent lamps) are manufactured a small drop of mercury is put into the lamp, and is vaporized into a gas when the light is turned on. Most of the gasses in these lamps are inert and do no damage to the environment; however mercury is VERY bad for the environment. It seeps into the ground, and can enter the water table. This can lead to mercury in the water we drink, and the food we eat.

So what are we to do? Fortunately it is becoming easier and easier to dispose of these lamps properly. Building Material Retailers like Home Depot and Lowes sell a box that you can put your old CFL’s in and ship them to a company that will do this for a very reasonable charge the (shipping is covered in the cost of the box).

Commercial business owners, discuss these issues with the contractor who replaces your lamps. Documentation of proper disposal is available, and may actually be in the case of a lighting retrofit project in order to receive rebates and compensation.

The more people learn about “Green Technologies” the better off our environment will be, just make sure that you don’t help in one way (saving energy), and hurt in another (polluting).

Jason
Estimator

“Go Green!” That is the mantra that is heard all over these days. We would all love to do our part to help the environment, but in these tight economic times we all seem to have less money in our budgets and “going green” can seem to cost a lot. So what are we to do?

Lighting loads are one of the most efficient and cost effective systems that we can “upgrade” to greener technologies in order to save on the electric bill. There are many different ways that this can be done with varying costs.

Think about how many lights are left on in your office building whenever someone goes to lunch, or for a smoke break, let alone overnight. Installing motion sensors will eliminate wasted energy from lights being left on, and it’s easy to retrofit these to existing systems with minimal cost. Typically all you have to do is replace the existing wall switches with occupancy sensors.

A lot of commercial buildings in use today were designed and built a long time before energy efficiency standards were put in place. Consequently many buildings are still utilizing old lighting technologies that are not only inefficient, but also annoying (old fluorescent fixtures utilize T-12 magnetic ballasts that “hum” constantly). Replacing these old ballasts with new T-8 or even newer T-5 ballasts and lamps can dramatically save energy, and improve noisy working conditions, which will help to improve productivity.

Replacing entire fixtures can seem cost prohibitive, but lighting retrofits have the quickest payback in the savings created by less energy consumption and higher productivity. Noisy, and many times unflattering color rending, “high bay” light fixtures can be replaced with High Output (HO) T-5 2X4 fixtures that are much brighter, quieter, and use a lot less energy.

In these tough times we all want to spend our money wisely. So the next time you have to have your lighting system looked at, consider discussing how you can reduce your monthly power bill by replacing outdated technologies with newer, Greener technologies.

Jason
Estimator