How LED lights will save you money and the environment.

 Darwin Electricians can see that the difference in running costs between LED and halogen/CFL or incandescent is huge, when you overlook the initial cost and weigh it up with final outcome we see the savings in black and white every time the power bill comes in. It’s time for us to share with you, what the benefits are for your back pocket as well as the environment.

 With new technology the initial cost is always expensive (how much did you pay for that IPOD back then?? And funnily enough, how much are you paying now?) But in this case the rewards far outstrip the initial costs.  Not only for your back pocket, but for the environment as well.

The technology used by LED fittings has come a long way in a few short years, a lot faster than that tape deck evolved into an MP3 player that fits in your pocket. I first played with LED lights a number of years ago, and to be honest….they were terrible, though kind of new and cool too. Yet in reality they had a few issues:  They were not worth the money, had poor colour rendering, frequently faulty, or so dim that extra lights needed to be installed just to get the same lighting output. Halogens will always be warmer than the warmest LED because of how the light is produced; generally the beam angle of a halogen compared to an LED will be a little wider also. This is evolving all the time with new technology and the LED light, colour and output is much better today.

I have found the LED fluorescent replacements available now to be far ahead of the standard T8 tubes over the last 6 months due to newer technology. There are even LED wifi fluorescent tubes available now that can be programmed to run office lights without doing huge renovations to your lighting system to run CBUS or other smart systems. Which can be controlled from a desktop or phone app!  In the last 6 months there has been a huge change, with a lot of the big brand lighting companies jumping on board also.

Today’s post though is going to bring it back to the basics.

What is it going to cost me?

I’m going to show this in a clear way if I just give you the fact and figures on an excel sheet. I’m going to base the power costs on .18 p/kwh. So with no further ado….

The above is just a rough estimate for the period of time your office, the local school, council chambers etc. leave their lights on per day, per year. $43.55 for one double fluorescent light fitting ads up after a while. Multiply that by the number of light fittings and you may be very surprised.

Half the power bill saved. The same amount of light output, if not more light when you use a quality replacement lamp, a heavier wallet and a healthier environment. Most of the tubes have a minimum lifespan of 50,000 hours, which is something like 14 years life period.  What is half your lighting cost saved over 14 years?? Especially when we really start paying more for power, a dollar saved is a dollar saved.

So that’s work covered briefly. How about at home? Most of us have halogen downlights throughout the house. They were a big hit pretty quickly. Small, lots of light, they look nice. It’s just that they heat up so much that you can’t touch them If they’ve been on, cause fires (hence the electrical laws changing about installation locations) the globes don’t last and they use a lot of power. The LED replacements don’t suffer from any of those issues, and the savings are even better than the fluorescent tube replacements.

I haven’t included the cost of running the transformer because it’s very small. Though the costs on both the halogens and fluorescents will vary depending on how old your original light fittings are.

Just replacing that halogen globe with an LED will save you plenty. To show it, big, bold and bright, I’m sharing an installation in Darwin, pretty standard lighting arrangement. The restaurant I had dinner in last week had over 50 halogens to light up the main dining area and the buffet area. Let alone throughout the rest of the place.

50watts X 50 lights = 2500Watts.

It would cost them much less than that to replace all the lights and they would see a return on their investment within one year, more money in their pocket. My recommendation to you ? Give them a go you’ll be pleasantly suprised, but remember: you get what you pay for, cheaper isn’t better.

By Jon Story