While it is often a necessity to leave a car at the airport, one of the most frustrating and exhausting tasks awaiting you upon arrival is locating your vehicle in a dimly lit parking garage at night. This is no doubt due to the number of burnt out and dim bulbs that maintenance has difficulty keeping up with.

But one busy airport, Detroit Metropolitan (DTW), has a plan that may just ease the pain of this experience with the replacement of 6,050 lighting fixtures with LED bulbs. With the current bulbs having an average life of only 13 months, the new LED lights are guaranteed to keep shining for years. As Wayne County Airport Authority (WCCA) CEO Tom Naughton states in Parking Network  “It will improve lighting in our parking facilities, reduce energy consumption, save on maintenance costs and shrink our carbon footprint.”

The planned DTW project may will be the largest LED conversion in the country thus far. While the project is slated to cost $6.2 million, the cost savings will continue to pay off to the tune of $1.2 million yearly. The energy saved alone can power 880 households for a year.

Incorporated with the energy-saving LEDs, will be a motion detection system. This system will automatically reduce lighting when there is no activity in the area and then activate additional lighting when vehicles and pedestrians are detected.

DTW airport is not the only site saving energy costs by using LED technology. According to the Environment News Service, the University of California Davis campus also replaced their parking lot lighting systems as well. Michael Siminovitch, director of the university’s Lighting Technology Center spearheaded the project which uses 20 percent of the energy of conventional parking lighting systems.

While LED lights give off brighter light, they use less electricity and last longer. Traditional parking lighting uses metal halide lights with 175 watts of power each while the LEDs are only 85 watts.

Relumination assists companies of all sizes in providing cost-effective lighting solutions. Contact us for more information on how your company can save energy costs and maintenance expenses with a lighting upgrade or retrofit.