One element of your building that can sometimes be overlooked – but is very important to increasing the energy efficiency of your operation – is your building’s lighting. Having an energy audit performed on your company’s building is important for numerous reasons. There are many ways that your building may be losing energy and this can drastically affect your overhead. There could be energy losses from burnt-out ballasts, or lights powered on during periods of time when they are unnecessary, to name just a few. The following are three ways an energy audit can benefit your business:
1. Reduce Overhead Costs
It’s estimated that the lighting of most business offices makes up roughly 30 percent of their total energy use. That’s not a small number, and it may be a significant factor in why your energy costs are high. An energy audit can help you determine how you can best save money. For example, it may be best to replace all of your existing compact fluorescent light bulbs with new LED bulbs. Although LED lights have a higher initial cost, they have a significantly longer lifespan and use less energy, resulting in lower energy bills over the long term. In addition, the quality of the light an LED bulb produces is superior to fluorescent. An energy audit will also take into account the lighting controls you have. For example, if an entire floor is being lit from one switch, then you are wasting money on unnecessary lighting. Consider a case where there is only one person putting in some extra work on a weekend, and only a small zone actually needs to be lit. Adding more effective, zone-based, lighting controls can yield significant energy savings in the long run by eliminating this sort of waste.
2. Improve the Productivity of Your Employees
It’s widely accepted that natural lighting is the best kind of lighting. This means that the closer in quality that your artificial lighting can get to looking like natural lighting, the better. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to install cheap lighting, such as fluorescent lighting, throughout your office space. Poor lighting, whether the office space is over lit or under lit, can cause a number of physical issues, from eye strain to headaches to drowsiness. All of these issues will eventually hurt the productivity of your business’s employees, which in turn will hurt the performance of the company overall. An energy audit will take into account the type of lighting you are using, how many fixtures are being used per square foot of your office space, the wattage of the existing fixtures, existing lighting controls, and more to help you determine how you can improve your lighting in order to boost worker productivity.
3. Improve Your Bottom Line
Lighting upgrades and replacements are fairly simple to do, and they can have an immediate and sizable impact on your bottom line. Thousands of companies who have performed lighting upgrades with modern technologies can verify that the savings are real and carry on over the life of the lighting products (from five to 30 years, depending on the product and application). Once you’ve upgraded, you’ll immediately begin reaping the benefits of reduced energy costs. You can also feel satisfied knowing that you’ve contributed positively to the environment as well as improved your facility’s ambiance and employee productivity.
Could your facility benefit from a lighting upgrade? Contact us to arrange a preliminary audit in your facility and find out. The potential savings may surprise you.
