How Much Am I REALLY Going to Save by Upgrading to LED Lighting?

Since we launched our company back in 2010, we’ve completed well over 50 large commercial building LED retrofits. As a matter of fact, four of our projects were the largest LED retrofits in the world at the time. Wow!

We’ve done car dealerships, retail strip centers, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, public & private schools, museums, banks, parking lots, office buildings, etc. Our specialty has been hospitals; we’ve completed over a dozen large hospital retrofits. Most notably, we were lucky enough to have been the company who retrofitted the very first two hospitals in Tennessee to LED lighting.

Back in the early days of our sales process, nearly 100% of our prospective customers would not even try to hide their skepticism. “How do I really know I will save that much money and energy by switching to LEDs?” At the time, we didn’t have loads of case studies to prove that what we were saying was in fact true. So, we had to spend an inordinate amount of time showing the simple math of energy savings calculations. Sadly, some people still didn’t believe the math and missed out on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings by “playing it safe” and not retrofitting to LEDs.

Today it is a bit different. Many of the projects we’ve completed have case studies and energy savings reports that have been verified by the customer and their respective energy provider. (Check them out here.) Even so, we still want to help reassure you how much you can REALLY save with LED lighting.

Energy Savings Example

Let’s say you have a 100-watt light bulb and replace it with a 50-watt light bulb. (Assume for a moment that the lower wattage bulb produces the exact same amount and type of light that the 100-watt bulb does.) How much energy did you save by making this switch? That saves you50% in energy!Is there any way you’d ever NOT save 50% energy withthis new light bulb? No, not unless the laws of math, science, and physics change. This meansthat no matter what happens, this new light bulb will forever use 50% of the energy the old one did.

Money Savings Example

Assuming you use this 50-watt light bulb the exact same amount of hours that you used to use the 100-watt light bulb, your savings in dollars will also be 50%. How do we know this?

If you pay $.10 per kWh for example, a 100-watt light bulb costs $.24 per day to operate. If you cut the energy consumption in half with a 50-watt bulb, then your cost drops from $.24 per day to $.12 per day.That saves you 50% in energy costs!

Maintenance Savings Example

Let’s assume that 100-watt light bulb burns out once a year and a new one costs $1.00. That means your maintenance costs for this bulb is $1.00 per year. The 50-watt bulb in our example has a life span of ten years. It costs $3.00 to replace. So it’s maintenance cost is $.30 per year.That saves you 70% in maintenance costs (annualized over ten years). In reality, it saves you 100% of your maintenance costs each year.

Conclusion

On average, LED lighting consumes 70% less energy than traditional lighting systems (e.g. fluorescent, metal halide, high pressure sodium, incandescent, halogen, etc.) This will save you 70% on energy costs.

On average, LED lighting lasts 10-50x longer than traditional lighting sources. This will save you 75-99% on annual maintenance replacement costs.

On average, LED systems save our customers somewhere between 25% and 33% on their entire electric bill. While our example above was dealing with one measly 100-watt light bulb, imagine how many watts of light bulbs are in your building! You could be saving $5,000, $10,000, $50,000 per month in energy and maintenance savings. Isn’t that worth the time to investigate?

Healthy skepticism is appreciated. On the other hand, skepticism that makes you refuse to investigate is just not good business sense. After all, you’ve got more important things to spend your money on than high electric bills.

See how Gap, Inc saved nearly $1 million by downloading the case study below: