Commercial Solar

Solar and Lighting:

Business and commercial property owners would like to cut down their monthly energy bills. Would you also like to be known as an energy conscious company? Investing in energy efficient equipment will not only lighten your monthly energy payments but also improve your business’s competitive edge by showing clients and customers that your are an environmentally responsible business.

While there are now different alternatives of renewable energy, the most popular and perhaps most efficient is solar energy. In fact, “an estimated one million residential and 200,000 commercial solar water-heating systems have been installed in the United States” (DOE).

Why:

Here are a few of the benefits you can expect from investing in energy efficient products

• Protect against rising utility rates

  In today’s economy, rising utility rates has become the norm. People are looking for an alternative energy source that will allow them to cut down on their monthly energy bills.

• Reduce operating costs

  Saving money in your business will benefit not only your customers, but also your employees by reducing salary cutbacks and sales price hikes.

• Take advantage of Government tax incentives and rebates

  Federal and state governments are currently offering corporations up to 30% tax incentives and 5 year MACRS on solar installations.

  
  

  *For more information regarding rebates in the State of Florida, please refer to http://www.dep.state.fl.us/energy/energyact/solar.htm
  

• Good return on investment

  With the amount of money you will be saving by investing in your own energy efficient equipment, you will be able to see a return on investment within a few years.

• Long term reliability and low maintenance costs

  Power outages can become one less thing to worry about in your daily life. Installation of solar equipment guarantees that you will be able to continue productivity in your business or provide electricity to your clients while others are unable to offer services.  Additionally, most energy efficient installations, especially solar panels and solar water heaters require little to no maintenance compared to other standard energy equipment.

• Become a Green Business/show environmental responsibility

  Show clients and customers that you are going the extra mile by providing them with the best possible service without harming the environment.

Energy- Wise Lighting:

Lighting is an element of our home and work environment that affects our life in many different ways.

Lighting lets us see to carry out the daily tasks of life; it affects our comfort and mood, and it can provide safety and security. Lighting and lighting fixtures also play a major role in the interior decoration of our homes.

Our consumption of electricity related to lighting also affects our budgets, both at home and in our workplaces. The Department of Energy reports that we spend, on average, 5-10% of our electric bills on lighting in our homes. In some regions of the U.S. this amount can be as high as 25% where air-conditioning is a modest portion of the bill.

ALA members provide ideas of how you can reduce your home's electric bill by installing energy-efficient lighting, and will also provide you with a general overview of home lighting concepts.

As a point of beginning, let's look at some basic concepts that will help us to better understand how these savings can be achieved.

Energy Efficiency with Lighting

Saving lighting energy requires either reducing electricity consumed by the light bulbs and light fixtures or reducing the length of time that the lights are on. This can be accomplished by:

• Reducing the amount of time that lights are on. This can be accomplished by using dimmers and other lighting controls, and educating family members to turn off unneeded lights.
• Lowering wattage, which involves replacing bulbs or entire fixtures with bulbs and fixtures that provide the same amount or greater amounts of light with but with reduced electricity usage. Today, this can be accomplished most easily by replacing inefficient incandescent bulbs with incandescent/halogen bulbs or compact fluorescent bulbs

Replacing Lamps and Fixtures

"Relamping" means substituting one light bulb for another to save energy. You can decide to make illumination higher or lower when relamping. But be sure that the new bulbs light output fits the tasks performed in the space and conforms to the fixture's specifications.

Matching replacement bulbs to existing fixtures and ballasts can be challenging, especially with older fixtures. Buying new fixtures made for new lamps produces superior energy savings, reliability, and longevity compared with relamping.

Energy-Efficiency with Lighting Controls

Lighting controls are devices for turning lights on and off or for dimming them. The most useful controls for increasing lighting energy-efficiency in a home are dimmers, photocells, and occupancy sensors.

• Dimmers reduce the wattage and output of incandescent and fluorescent lamps and significantly increase the service life of incandescent lamps. Dimming fluorescents requires special dimming ballasts and fixtures, but does not reduce their efficiency.
• Photocells turn lights on and off in response to natural light levels. Photocells switch outdoor lights on at dusk and off at dawn, for example.
• Occupancy sensors activate lights when a person is in the area and then turn off the lights after the person has left. They are popular for areas such as closets and recreation rooms.

Wattage, Lumens and Efficacy

• Wattage is a measurement of the electrical energy used by an electrical device, such as a light bulb, but it is not a measurement of the amount of light being produced. The measurement of light output from a lamp is the lumen. All light bulbs have a lumen rating, and it is the relationship between the lumens being produced and the wattage being consumed that can provide us valuable information about the energy-efficiency of a light bulb.

Efficacy

•   The relationship between lumens and wattage is called efficacy. This is the ratio of light output from a lamp to the electric power it consumes and is measured in lumens per watt (LPW).
•   Incandescent lamps have an efficacy range from 15 lpw to slightly over 20 lpw. Fluorescent lamps have an efficacy range from 60 lpw to almost 100 lpw. As you can see from these numbers, the choice of light bulb can have a significant impact on electrical energy consumption.

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