Energy efficiency has become one of the buzzwords associated with reducing the impact of commercial activity on the planet. From time to time, it’s helpful to return to basics to reflect on the substance behind the hype. As a reminder, true energy efficiency is simply using less energy for a task to get the same result. Therefore, energy-efficient lighting uses less energy to produce the same light output as its less efficient counterparts. The decision to switch a facility to energy-efficient lighting has implications for that business and the nation.

The Benefits of Energy-Efficient Lighting for One Business

When a facility finds ways to improve energy efficiency, that business saves energy and money through reduced utility costs. Since lighting costs represent up to 30 percent of a facility’s electric expenses, upgrading to energy-efficient lighting can yield significant savings. For example, Relumination’s lighting solutions decreased Southern Glazer’s lighting energy consumption by 91.5 percent.

Facility managers don’t have to be concerned that it will take a long time to see a return on the initial investment. Many Relumination customers see a return on their lighting investment in less than three years.

Energy-Efficient Lighting Is Good for the Nation

While one facility’s switch to energy-efficient lighting is of great benefit to that company, it’s a drop in the bucket for the nation. Yet, if most facilities in the country choose energy-efficient lighting, the country would experience a tremendous positive impact. In fact, the United States Department of Energy reports widespread LED use would save the country more than $30 billion in electricity costs and 348 TWh of electricity by 2027.

Relumination provides energy-efficient lighting solutions for commercial and industrial facilities, including warehouses, distribution centers, and transportation facilities. Contact us to learn how we can help your business.

The future of IT depends on high-tech advances in data centers. Although we expect to see new data center systems being introduced, most people do not focus their attention on lighting advances in data centers. According to the Telecommunications Industry Association, there are standards that a data center has to follow. When you look at the latest release of the TIA-942-A, you will see a summary of lighting recommendations. In the document, there are three levels of lighting that are recommended:

• Level 1: the lighting needs to be convenient to support video surveillance usage even when the data center is not occupied.
• Level 2: motion sensors should activate lighting the entries as people walk in. The lights also need to be programmed to illuminate all the passageways and aisles. The lighting should be convenient enough to support personnel identification through security cameras.
• Level 3: during maintenance or other services in the data center racks, the light should increase to 200 lux in the vertical plane and 500 lux in the horizontal plane. This level of lighting is not needed in the entire data center, but it should only be available at this level when the need arises on specific zones.

Controlling the Lighting Fixtures

Data centers are known for virtualization and automation among other things. This design is also going to be used to control state-of-the-art lights. Here is how:

• Automation: with lighting controls you can have a vast array of capabilities available at the touch of a button. From occupancy sensing, dimming, temperature control, facility and process monitoring and even space optimization.
• Virtualization: the use of smart technology will bring about lighting controls that can be operated remotely. This is a system that can be used on any scale and controlled from anywhere.

If you want to learn more on how to light your data center, contact us today.

You already know that every single display detail matters in retail spaces. But there’s nowhere that’s truer than in a grocery store. Different lights change how green the produce looks or how red and fresh the meat appears. Lighting also changes how customers move throughout the space and what they think of the experience. 

So don’t just switch to LEDs and opt for daylight settings. Here are three more ways to use your lights profitably:

Light up bodegas and sections differently.

People notice differences in lighting even if they don’t know what they noticed. So underscore your bodegas, clearance sections, or new arrivals with pointed lights that have a slightly higher brightness or a different color. 

Add more light over high-margin or must-go products in the freezer aisles.

Freezer space is a valuable commodity, and it’s essential to get rid of clearance to make room for more profitable items. But it can be tricky if all of the clearance is grouped away from their usual sections. Draw customers’ attention to the clearance shelves by making them light up first. If your store has energy-saving lights with motion detectors, make sure any movement triggers the lights above the clearance.

Backlight display signs and decorations.

Signs and decorations can draw a lot of attention to displays. Even if your store has dim lighting, customers will be able to see and read the displays. What backlighting adds is another layer of invitation. Customers will gravitate toward even out of the way displays if the light is bright and welcoming. So use backlighting anytime you need to change your customers’ usual travel paths to bring them to a new stand or display in the store.

Grocery store lighting can make all the difference in what non-essential products become popular or stay on the shelves. Contact Relumination today for the right supplies and advice to make your store shine.

When you have a business, you have a lot of expenses to consider, including your energy usage. However, there are there are things that you can do to lower your energy bill while creating a comfortable workplace for you and your employees.

Effectively Program the Thermostat

Programmable thermostats are one of the best investments that you can make for your business. Even if you change the thermostat setting by one degree can help with saving as much as 3% on the next bill.

Change Your Computers

Another effective way that you can lower your energy costs is by changing your computers from desktops to laptop computers. This may cost you a bit up front, but it also is going to help you save money on your electric bill. The energy use of laptops is as much as 90% less than monitors and laptops, which makes them a great choice when your company needs new computers.

Consider Upgrading Your Landscaping

Chances are that you might not think about landscaping when it comes to saving money on your energy costs. But when you have trees planted in just the right area it can help with keeping the building much cooler during the summer months, reducing the need to run your air conditioning.

Purchase Energy Efficient Models

When you are constantly using certain machines and equipment, you should consider upgrading them to models that are more efficient if possible. Equipment that has Energy Star labels on them is going to tell you what air conditioners, skylights and refrigerators are more energy-efficient than others.

These are just four of the things that you can do to help you save money on your energy bill. The will help you with saving money while creating a workplace that is more efficient and comfortable for everyone involved. 

We have many other ways to help you save energy in your business. Contact us today and let us show you how!

When operating a manufacturing facility there a lot of different competing concerns that need to be addressed and considered, pulling ones attention in many different directions at once. Safety, quality, productivity, costs, and employee morale are all at the top of this list, and often times every issue facing a plant manager boils down to one of these issues. Few actions that a facility can take will impact several of these, even fewer will impact all of these considerations. One item in particular will positively impact all of these areas, and it’s one of the simplest most cost effective ways to address all of these issues. Ready for it? Good quality manufacturing lighting.

Safety is always a top concern when running a manufacturing facility. Trip and fall accidents and hand injuries are always on the top of OSHA’s list of injuries each year. There are many actions that can be taken to help alleviate these injuries but towards the top of that list is replacing old inefficient lighting with brand new, brighter, and more efficient lighting. Dimly lit walkways and aisles suddenly become well lit, allowing workers to quickly identify objects left in the walkway. Employees stop squinting at their dark work stations and instead easily see potentially hazardous objects before they place their hands near them. It sounds so simple, but simply changing the environment into a well lit area heads off a huge percent of potential accidents. You never hear about a worker tripping over a misplaced pallet because it was too easy to see.

Every production process is always striving to have a perfect quality control process, but inevitably there is always something that makes its way to the customer. Function test and spot checking catch many of these issues, but they often focus on the functioning of the product, not on how it looks. Small blemishes and scratches are often left to the human eye to identify and address. If your customer has better lighting than you, blemishes and scratches that are invisible in the shadows of your dimly lit production line are spotted a mile away when under the bright lights of brand new industrial lighting or a sunny day in the field. Don’t risk it. Install ample amounts of energy efficient lights throughout your facility and hard to see scratches, dents, and blemishes will all jump out at your employees and inspectors, minimizing the chance that they will turn up at a customer sight.

When a worker is searching through the shadows for a dropped part or to identify the part number listed on a box they are wasting valuable time they could be using to be producing product. Don’t throw this valuable time away. Ensure that there is more than enough light on your production line and in your warehouse so that your hard working employees are focused on their jobs, and not on trying to read a label in the dark.

This speaks to the morale of your workforce as well. If they are constantly squinting to do their jobs or walking into work in a dark dimly lit facility, it brings their morale down. Brighten up their workspaces with brand new bright energy efficient lighting and suddenly walking into work isn’t depressing. Good quality lighting boosts the morale, and subsequently the productivity of every employee on your manufacturing floor.

Many older manufacturing facilities have old outdated lighting. Its easy to just keep using these old lights and not realize how much they are costing you. New energy efficient lighting often times saves so much on energy costs that they quickly pay for themselves in lower utility bills. This is even more true if you can utilize power company incentives or if your facility is charged rate based on peak load. This speeds up the already short payback period. These cost savings are even higher when think of all of the additional gains listed above simply by replacing your old existing lighting with new energy efficient lighting.

When you consider all of the benefits of updating your manufacturing lighting, it’s hard to think of a single investment that you could make that would impact as many aspects of your business as energy efficient lighting. If you are interested in seeing how our lighting can impact you please contact us.

Businesses today are always looking for a way to be more sustainable, and to reduce their carbon footprint. Partially because it’s good for a business’s image to show that it cares about the environment, but also because it saves money. One of the smartest, easiest things you can do as a business is to overhaul the kinds of lights you’re using.

LEDs are cheaper now than they’ve ever been before.

Why Aren’t You Using LEDs For Your Business?

LED lights, according to Boston University, save up to 80 percent of the power used by traditional light bulbs. Which is why, if you simply unscrew the incandescent bulbs you’re using now, you’ll experience an instant savings with little actual change to your lighting setup.

Even if you use a more complicated lighting array (fluorescent tubes, arc-sodium lights, etc.), you will still save in costs over the long-term by switching to LED lighting. While the up-front cost often makes a business balk, the important thing to look at is your savings over the lifetime of the installation. Every day you use a less efficient lighting system is another day you’re using (and paying for) more electricity than you need.

A simple analysis of your current lighting system will tell you how much you’re currently spending, and how much switching to LEDs would save you over the lifetime of your business. However, what that analysis won’t measure is how much waste you save (since LED bulbs last longer, and are completely recyclable). It also won’t measure the positive impact your change will have on your company’s image, and on your ability to draw new clients to you with your green initiative.

Other than the initial, up-front cost (which will eventually be paid for by the system’s savings), there is literally no downside to switching to a cleaner, greener, and more sustainable lighting system.

For more information on sustainability, and on LED lighting systems, simply contact us today!

More and more businesses today are concerned with sustainability and reducing their impact on the environment. One way they achieve this is by implementing energy efficient lighting systems. Not only are these systems better for the environment, but they can positively affect a firm’s bottom line.

What is Energy Efficient Lighting?

Energy efficient lighting aims to keep the overall lighting wattage low while still delivering the necessary amount of illumination to an area. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways: switching from incandescent to LED bulbs, supplying areas of the facility that aren’t used often with motion sensors that turn the lights on when someone enters the room, or maximizing natural light provided by windows and skylights.

Profitability

Installing energy efficient lighting in your facility can lead to significant savings in energy costs, and lowering overhead expenses without sacrificing lighting quality is always a good thing. In addition, utility companies are often mandated by regulators to encourage consumers to use less energy. One way they carry this off is through incentives, a way of rewarding businesses for using less energy. Many companies fail to leverage these incentives, giving the firms that do an edge. Moreover, this perk helps to increase the return on investment of the new lighting system.

How We Can Help

Energy efficient lighting systems are not one size fits all. A warehouse with high ceilings, tall shelves, and few windows has very different lighting needs from an office building with an open floor plan and plenty of natural light. At Relumination, our seasoned lighting professionals can assess your company’s unique requirements, measure current light levels and identify problem areas and opportunities for improvement, then design the optimal layout for your facility. If you choose to go forward we can install the system and even help with the sometimes confusing paperwork needed to obtain the energy company incentives.

To learn more about how Relumination can help you save with energy-efficiency, please contact us.

While businesses will typically spend resources on consultants for process efficiencies during the redesign process, they might not look towards energy efficiencies as a cost-saving measure. If your business is considering a redesign or new build, you could be missing some of the simplest cost savings possible if you omit a lighting consultation. That’s where Relumination comes in. Whether it’s during a redesign or the construction of a new building, remember to include Relumination during your planning phase.

Firstly, we’ll help you consider repositioning your fixtures to better fit how your business works now. If your building was designed more than fifteen years ago the chances are that you have had to make modifications to your processes and physical environment in order to keep up with your business’s changing needs. It may also be that your physical layout didn’t change, but you could eliminate a number of fixtures by using different lighting — perhaps a fixture that spreads light wider or lighting closer to the work being done.  This too would help reduce energy usage. If you’re considering making a change to your physical layout make sure to add a lighting consultation so your design isn’t limited because of your current lighting scheme.

Once we have considered where your lighting needs to be, it’s time to properly determine how much lighting you’ll need in those fixtures. No one wants to work in dim — and possibly dangerous — conditions, but there are times where you can safely scale down the wattage used in a fixture. This too will save your business in the long run. While often overlooked, installing lighting fixtures that are too large for what you truly need is like buying a seven-ton air conditioner for your tiny apartment. It will certainly cool down the area, but it will do so with such poor efficiency that you’ll end up wasting money.

Whatever your business’s current buildings’ needs are, remember to include a lighting consultation from Relumination in order to reap energy efficiencies that add to your bottom line.

Even though a lot of people are aware of the benefits of LED lighting, some of them still remain resistant to the idea of replacing all their lights with LEDs. If you’re running a large organization such as a university, replacing all your lights can seem like a daunting task, not to mention an expensive one. However, there are many benefits to having LED lights in a university, such as the following:

1. Concentration: Believe it or not, LED lights can actually help in improving students’ concentration. This is because LED light mimics natural light. It’s the closest thing to daylight that you’re going to be able to find. And if you can’t have daylight in each and every classroom or in your library or cafeteria, you can at least get LEDs. This will prevent your students’ eyes from hurting unnecessarily and will also improve concentration.
2. Safety: Unlike incandescent or fluorescent lights, LED lights aren’t likely to burn out quickly. In fact, the life of an LED light bulb is about 50,000 hours which translates to 11 years if you burn it for about 12 hours a day. So you can be sure that your campus will be well-lit and safe for all your students if you replace all the outdoor lights with LEDs.
3. Energy Efficiency: At first, you might balk at the price of replacing all your lights with LEDs. But keep in mind that LEDs are far more energy efficient than your regular lightbulb. So your energy bills will be less. Plus, you won’t have to keep replacing bulbs regularly as you would with incandescents or fluorescents. This also leads to savings for you. Running a university, although an admirable task, is not necessarily an inexpensive one. So why not save money where you can?