Benefits
The benefits of LED lights are hard to overstate. Put simply, they save you money. In recent years the cost of LED lights has dropped dramatically, meaning that what were previously cost-prohibitive installation fees are now much more manageable. That in turn means recouping your investment takes much less time.
Energy alone comprises at least 77 percent of the cost of your lighting (and as much as 85 percent if you’re located in a coastal, high-utility-cost region). Labor to change burned-out products, on average, is about 11 percent of the total cost of your lighting. Reducing those two costs can make a staggering difference in your energy consumption and maintenance costs. LEDs use much less energy than traditional light sources and can often last tens of thousands of hours under normal usage.
We have more information about the benefits up upgrading to LEDs in our articles, but we’ll go into a quick example here.
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.
Obviously this is a fairly simple example using a standard 60W bulb. Commercial and industrial fixtures can use many times this amount of energy. A traditional exterior halogen wall pack can use 250W or more, whereas its LED counterpart uses120W, less than half of that. High-powered HID, halogen, incandescent, and even fluorescent fixtures can be replaced with LEDs that produce equivalent lumens while using a fraction of the energy and resulting in a fraction of the cost.
HardWire Lighting uses only the highest quality DLC rated commercial grade LED lights and fixtures for all our retrofit projects.
