Continued from our Jan. 2012 eNewsletter.

Recently we invested in energy efficient lighting for our warehouse. Our new induction lighting provided by the Eco-Green-Energy. It uses half the energy as before, making it more cost effective and better choice for the environment.

One of the things I noticed when we purchased our new warehouse was the metal halide lighting in the warehouse. There were sixty 400 watt fixtures in the warehouse and while they offered plenty of light there were several problems with them.

1. Metal halide lights do not turn on right away. The warm up period can be as long as five minutes. In a warehouse full of pallets and drums, this means that you have to wait before you can walk around.

2.They are expensive to operate. On average a 400 watt metal halide costs $130.13 per year to operate. With 60 of them the average cost would be $7807.80. In our case, because of the number of hours we work, it was estimated that our cost would be $10,672.10 per year.

We turned to Sheldon Wardwell of Eco-Green. They proposed replacing the 60 400 W Metal Halide lights with 200 watt High Bay Induction lights. By using one-half the energy, we would cut that yearly cost in half, also reducing the CO2 and carbon emissions associated with electricity production. The new lights also have no warm up time and should last up to 100,000 hours.

The icing on the cake was that our local electric utility, DTE, had a Your Energy Savings Program  that provided rebates to us that cut the cost of installation by 30%.  This reduced our payback period for this project to only 2 years.

Next up, changing our office lighting from fluorescent to LED. The future is certainly looking bright.