| Frequently
Asked Questions
Virtually
every business has lighting needs, whether for office,
retail, restaurant or warehouse space. Lighting
is a major component of a building's energy costs, about
40% on average. The Smart Lights Program is
specially designed to help small businesses cut their
energy costs through lighting efficiency, while improving
lighting quality.
How
the Smart Lights Program Works
Facts
About Commercial Lighting
_______________________________________
How
the Smart Lights Program Works
|
| 1:
Why does the Smart Lights Program only work with
small businesses? |
A:
Small businesses have long been overlooked by traditional
energy rebate programs, which have not been able to
address the unique needs of small businesses when it
comes to making investments in lighting. Namely, small
business owners don't have time to become lighting experts
so that they can find the right lighting applications
and contract with reliable lighting contractors. Also,
small businesses often don't have the cash flow to pay
for 100% of the lighting costs and then apply for an
energy rebate. The Smart Lights Program is designed
to assist businesses in overcoming these obstacles to
energy efficiency.
Smart
Lights provides its services to the small business community
in the East Bay. For
more information about who's eligible, click here. It
is a goal of the Program to help these businesses become
more competitive through increased efficiency.
Saving energy dollars keeps money in the community so
that it can be reinvested locally.
|
| 2:
What services does the Smart Lights Program offer?
|
A:
The Smart Lights Program offers full service technical
assistance, project management, and upfront discounts
on lighting installation costs.
|
| 3:
What happens when I participate in the Smart Lights
Program? |
A:
Once you contact the Smart Lights Program, we send you
a one-page enrollment form. When we get that enrollment
form back, we send out an independent lighting specialist
that assesses your lighting needs, specifies an efficient
lighting retrofit, and estimates the energy savings
of the retrofit. From this assessment, we are able to
tell you how much money you could save per year, how
much the lighting retrofit will cost, what type of discount
the Program will provide, and how much time it will
take for the energy savings to pay for your investment.
We will provide you with a free, no-obligation
report.
If
you decide to accept the retrofit that is recommended
in the report, the Smart Lights Program schedules the
installation with a pre-screened lighting contractor.
We do quality control checks on the installation
to make sure everything is installed correctly.
|
| 4:
What types of discounts does the Smart Lights Program
offer? |
A:
We offer two types of discounts. First, we will
pay the lighting contractor a certain portion of the
installation costs. This means that the discount
portion will not come out of your pocket. The discount
is based on the estimated energy savings realized by
your project. These discounts typically range between
50% and 70% of equipment and installation costs, with
a cap at 90% of costs.
Second,
we have negotiated volume discounts on fixture costs
with the lighting contractors participating in the program.
This means that the total project costs, even before
the discount, is much lower than what you could get
as a small business working with an independent contractor.
|
| 5:
Can I use my own contractor instead of those that
are participating in Smart Lights? |
A:
Yes, you can use your own contractor. The
benefits of the Program will be slightly different.
If your contractor specifies the job, we will need to
verify those specifications in order to calculate the
discount. We will also need to charge a fee to perform
a quality control check on the finished job, as we have
not screened your contractor in the same way that the
Smart Lights contractors have been screened.
In
addition, you will be responsible for managing the contractor
and paying the contractor the full costs of the project.
The discount will be reimbursed to you directly upon
completion of the quality control check. You will need
to give us your City business license number in order
for us to process the check.
|
| 6:
How can I contact the Smart Lights Program? |
A:
Call us at (510) 981-8955 ext. 224.
Or email us at smartlights@ebenergy.org.
You can enroll by clicking
here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Facts
About Commercial Lighting
|
| 7:
Don't fluorescent lights flicker and buzz? |
A:
No, the newer fluorescent lights provide steady
and even lighting with no buzzing or flickering.
The new T8 lamps use an electronic ballast, unlike the
magnetic ballast used by old fluorescent lamps. Magnetic
ballast lamps cycle on and off at about 120 cycles per
second, which some people perceive as a flicker. New
electronic ballast operate at about 24,000 cycles per
second, eliminating the flicker. The "buzzing"
is also gone, since there is no vibration caused by
the magnetic action of a core and coil in the magnetic
ballast.
|
| 8:
The color from the fluorescent lights is usually
too blue. How are the new fluorescent lights different?
|
A:
New linear fluorescent lamps (called "T8
lamps") and compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have
superior phosphors to the old fluorescent lamps and
can be ordered in warm (similar to incandescent lamps),
medium or cool colors, so they can be used
in a variety of applications, from retail sites to warehouses,
with excellent results.
There
are two characteristics used to describe the "color"
of lighting: color temperature and color rendition.
Color temperature refers to how we
perceive the light itself coming from a lamp. A lower
color temperature, around 1,500 degrees Kelvin (equivalent
to sunrise/sunset) is perceived as warm and dim (or
on the red end of the spectrum), whereas a color temperature
around 6-7,000 degrees Kelvin (equivalent to noontime
sunlight) is perceived as cool and bright (or on the
blue end of the spectrum). Incandescent lamps are around
2,500 degrees Kelvin. The most pleasing indoor light
temperatures are around 2,700 to 5,000 degrees Kelvin.
New fluorescent lights provide this range of temperature
and offer brighter, more pleasing lighting solutions
for your business.
Color
rendition is how accurately the light makes
objects appear (as compared to full daylight). For instance,
those orangey sodium vapor streetlights have a very
low color rendition index (CRI) of about 30 and render
everything in greys, while the old fluorescent lamps
that everybody complains about have a CRI in the 60's.
The new fluorescent T8 lamps have a CRI in the mid-80's.
"Warmer" lights accentuate reds, oranges,
and yellows, while "cooler" lights accentuate
blues, greens, and violets.
|
| 9:
We already have fluorescent lights that work fine.
Why should we remove them and reinstall new fluorescent
fixtures? |
A:
Besides the improved light color and elimination
of buzzing and flickering, new fluorescent lamps are
lower in wattage, by about 29 watts per 2-lamp fixture.
Each fixture you replace with a new energy-saving fixture
will save you money.
For
the typical business that has lights on for 10 hours
per day, six days a week, this means each 2-lamp fixture
will save nearly 90 kilowatt hours a year, every year.
[(29 x 10 hours x 6 days x 52 weeks) divided by 1,000
watts = 90 kWh]. For a site with 50 fixtures, the savings
would be 4,524 kWh, or about $724.00 per year (@ the
commercial PG&E rate of $0.16/kwh).
You
should consider upgrading lighting systems if you currently
use incandescent lights or older fluorescent lights.
|
| 10:
What is the environmental impact of throwing out
working light fixtures and replacing them with these
new ones? |
A:
Under the Smart Lights Program, all lamps and PCB ballasts
will be recycled safely, instead of being tossed
into waste containers and sent to the landfill.
11:
What are the environmental benefits of saving electricity?
A:
Whenever you save electricity you are reducing
air pollution and greenhouse gases coming from power
plants. Over the lifetime of a single T8 lamp
you will save $70-80 in electricity, save over 500 kilowatt
hours of electricity (the same amount delivered by burning
about 500 lbs. of coal) and prevent the release of 500
lbs. of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.
Collectively
these savings add up and have significant environmental
benefits. Last year, the 900 Smart Lights participants,
through their energy savings, avoided the release of
approximately 5.3 million pounds of carbon dioxide.
This is equivalent to taking 320 cars permanently off
the road.
|
| 12:
I have some lights that are inadvertently left on
for long periods of time. How can Smart Lights help
me automate my lighting? |
A:
There are two simple ways to solve this problem. One
way is to install an occupancy sensor that will
automatically turn lights off when no one is in the
room. This is especially useful in conference
rooms, rest rooms, or locations that have only occasional
use. A second method is to install a photocell
that senses how much daylight is entering a room,
and powers down the lights to pre-set levels. This is
helpful in offices, or older buildings that have lots
of natural daylight available, but interior lights are
on.
Photocells
and occupancy sensors can reduce energy costs in many
applications-the amount of savings will vary according
to the site.
|
| 13:
Doesn't
it take more energy to turn lights back on rather
then leave them on? And doesn't it wear the fluorescent
lamps out faster? |
A:
The answer to both questions is "no."
The very short surge of energy used when lights are
switched on is much less than the energy used by lights
left on for more than five minutes. It is true,
turning fluorescent lamps on and off will shorten their
life, but usually it is only a matter of a few hours-new
fluorescent lamps will last about 27,000 hours on average
(about 6,700 starts), so even shortening the life of
the bulb by five hundred hours isn't a very large impact.
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