ECO BUSINESS SOURCE Phillips Award Winning L Prize LED Lamp and the Smooth Seamless Design of the Philips LED Lamps with AirFlux Technology
Bright Ideas for Businesses: Dahl Lighting My husband and I have a 3,000-square-foot gallery space that used to use 200 halogen spotlights illuminating at 90 watts each to properly light the artwork. As you can imagine, the electric bills were high, around $750 per month. We’d been working with Dahl Lighting and they knew we were interested in trying out the new LED bulbs as soon as their light technology improved to our current standards. The eco-friendly fluorescent bulbs, which had horrible light color and quality, were never an option for us as an art gallery. This past August, Dahl sales representative Doug brought us a sample of the new Phillips LED light. The light was better than the standard halogens. Not only did the lightbulb use one-fifth of the energy—from 90 to 19.5 watts—but it was also brighter and brought out more details in the paintings while still maintaining the warm light spectrum (2,700-3,000 Kelvin). An additional feature of LED bulbs, unlike the halogens, is they do not emit ultraviolet light, which is better for preserving the integrity of the artwork. At around $50 per bulb, our investment was to be between $6,000 and $7,000. Fortunately for us, Dahl is an approved trade ally for the PNM rebate program. Our application received a rebate of $12 per bulb to 50 percent project cost. In our case, we were able to eliminate bulbs and had such an extreme change in our electrical usage that we qualified for a bigger bonus. Our next month’s electric bill was drastically reduced to a
mere $155. That same week we received our rebate check from PNM. Based on the huge energy savings and rebate, we would pay off our investment in less than a year. There were other “costs” associated with outdated technology that became apparent to us after installing the LED bulbs. Half of the year we had to cool our building down to offset the tremendous amount of heat coming from the old halogen bulbs. In September, we did not have to run our swamp cooler because the rooms stayed cooler thanks to the LEDs emitting less warmth. Additionally, we saved on the cost of buying halogen bulbs every three months and extra staff time taken up by looking for and replacing the burnt bulbs, climbing up the tall ladder to our 12-foot ceilings, waiting for the light bulbs to cool before changing them out—all unnecessary, hidden maintenance hassles. We cannot express how pleased we are since we have made the switch to LEDs for our business. We also chose to receive 90 percent of our energy from the renewable wind option offered by PNM to be extra eco-conscious for our business. Now the gallery looks much better, saves money every month, and uses less electricity at the same time. Thank you, Dahl Lighting, for your help. Kim Kelly Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe
Dahl Lighting Showroom 1000A Siler Park Lane Santa Fe, NM 87507 Tel (505) 471-7272 Fax (505) 471-9232 dahllighting.com