Lighting and Energy

Lighting affects the way you feel, work, and interact with others. It helps you accomplish everyday tasks. How would you manage without the light you use to do your everyday jobs. Light gives us beauty as well as vision, and the quality is often far more important to us than the quantity.

Efficient lighting is a science as well as an art. And yet, most of us still use the incandescent bulb, which is basically the same technology invented by Thomas Edison over 100 years ago. Since lighting represents a large percent of your business or home's electrical use, increasing your lighting efficiency is one of the easiest and fastest ways to lower your energy bills.

The Colorado Springs Utilities as well as the federal government have numerous rebate programs available to upgrade your lighting system to energy efficient. High-efficiency lamps, such as T-5 and T-8 fluorescent lamps with electronic ballasts, provide the same or improved illumination as do fixtures with T-12 lamps and magnetic ballasts. Combined with de-lamping and high-efficiency reflectors, retrofit savings can approach a factor of two. Depending on usage patterns, installation costs, and other factors, paybacks for many lighting retrofits are often three years or less. Additional benefits of energy-efficient lighting include lowered cooling costs since less waste heat must be removed by the air conditioning system.

A wide range of compact fluorescent lighting (CFL) fixtures are now available whose characteristics are far superior to earlier models. Modern versions typically have zero hum, long-life electronic ballasts, excellent color rendering, are four times more efficient than incandescent, a lifetime of up to 10,000 hours. Since a CFL outlasts a typical incandescent by a factor of 10 or more, their upfront costs are now about the same. Lifetime savings of a 25-watt CFL over a 100-watt incandescent is 750 kWh - and maintenance costs are reduced as well.

Some of our customers have seen significant savings by using our lighting retrofit solutions. One of our customers, Heating and Plumbing Engineers, not only received the benefit of reduced electrical consumption, but was able to increase productivity, quality, employee morale, and most of all, safety.

Because we don’t believe in a one size fits all approach we can promise you that we will look for a solution that is just right for you.