The Importance Of Energy-Efficiency

If you are an owner of a commercial building, something you should be familiar with is energy efficiency. Most people are familiar with energy efficiency but don’t realize how much your building could be using every day. You want to operate the best possible building with the best possible quality and services. Reducing your energy efficiency can be a game-changer in the quality and cost of your commercial building.

What Is Energy-Efficiency

Energy efficiency means using less energy to do the same task, eliminating energy waste. Increasing energy efficiency is the most cost-effective and often timely way to reduce the use of fossil fuels. In regard to commercial buildings, energy efficiency refers to the extent to which energy is consumed per square meter.

Why You Should Care

Lighting is one of the biggest costs in commercial buildings.  Upgrading your lighting to more energy-efficient solutions can decrease the overall cost of running your building. We have helped our customers save over 4 million dollars to date. Not only can decreasing energy efficiency help your wallet it can also help the environment. When you consume less power in a commercial building you are helping conserve resources and contributing to a healthier and safer world. The companies we have served have seen a 90% decrease in energy consumption.

How We Can Help

We offer lighting solutions that are sustainable and reduce energy consumption. Our customers are in a variety of industries and include companies such as WinCo Foods,  Dillard’s, Alberstons, and more. We assist facilities with reducing energy costs, improving lighting, lower maintenance expenses and most importantly reduce your environmental footprint. Which will make a healthier and happier environment for your employees.

Contact us today for all of your energy-efficient lighting solutions. And check out our blog for more energy-efficient tips!

How To Use IoT Controls To Aid Social Distancing In Your Facility

A major issue that businesses and workplaces are facing today is encouraging its workers to abide by social distancing guidelines. In larger facilities, this is not always easy to monitor and can be overwhelming. However, an LED lighting system that utilizes IoT (Internet of Things) technology can put this task at your fingertips and eliminate the need to tour your facility. This technology monitors the people and assets in your facility and reports back to you in real time, and also allows for LED lighting adjustments for worker safety. IoT controls can also make it easier for your employees to meet social distancing guidelines and stay safe.

Social Distancing Controls

Employee Location Monitoring – IoT applications are able to track the location of people in your facility and uses an advanced algorithm to provide accurate data by the room. Employees and others wear tags for tracking purposes which are detected by smart sensors. You can also use these applications to replay data and see where people have been in the past, and whether they have broken any social distancing guidelines. Searches and alerts are also available.

Occupancy Tracking – Other IoT applications make use of location tracking to calculate the occupancy of a specific room or area in your facility. Sensor networks are able to track the movement of your employees and provide accurate views of occupancy in real-time, highlighting problem areas where social distancing isn’t (or cannot be) practiced. These IoT applications can also show where employees tend to congregate over time.

Facility Insight – The ability to sense the lighting levels and occupancy for an entire facility will reveal hidden problem areas and reduce human error. Real-time and historical data is made available in one central location. Monitoring the environment in your facility, or multiple facilities is vital to understanding worker behavior. HVAC failures and other equipment failures can cause workers to abandon social distancing and congregate in more comfortable areas, and alarms can be used to alert you to potential problems before this occurs.

Safety Controls

Advanced Lighting Controls – A wireless IoT system will allow you to easily adjust lighting levels by room and area not only to enhance worker comfort and safety but to encourage workers to practice social distancing in problem areas. Different lighting profiles, made by collecting data on employee movement and occupancy, can be configured by area throughout an entire Smart Building and adjusted accordingly throughout the day.

Fine Tuning – Other IoT apps can allow for occupancy sensing and adjust light levels automatically, and can be used to program the lighting system to dim a problem area progressively during high-occupancy times. These functions can be customized room by room for easy management of social distancing and can be done from virtually any mobile device.

Conclusion

The current health crisis is one that large facilities have never seen before and innovative solutions are needed to protect worker safety, health, and productivity. Using an IoT system with your LED lighting will make monitoring social distancing manageable and offer innovative solutions for enforcing worker safety. If you have questions or need more information on how an IoT system can help you, be sure to contact us.

Top 3 Reasons to Upgrade Your Lighting

Business owners and building managers alike have been waging a war against lower-efficiency facility lighting for generations. Now, with LED lighting more accessible and affordable than ever, facility managers are faced with the question not only of replacing their out-of-date lighting systems, but the question of why they haven’t pulled the trigger on the energy-saving solution yet. With cost-saving effects, lower rates of failure and therefore lower maintenance costs, and better working conditions, business owners are going to want to strongly consider upgrading to energy-efficient LED lighting sooner rather than later.

Save Money on Utility Bills

It’s a well-known fact that LED light bulbs use considerably less energy than their fluorescent counterparts. These energy savings, when spread over an entire facility’s lighting system, could save thousands of dollars over the course of a year. Not only do these lamps save on the utility bill, but utility companies offer rebates simply for switching to LED systems. Business owners would be wise to consider these utility rebates in addition to energy bill savings.

Lower Rate of Failure

Not only do LED lights offer the obvious energy-efficient savings on utility bills, but they also offer energy efficient savings in terms of lower maintenance costs and labor requirements. LED lights last on average, years longer than traditional lighting and therefore present fewer needs for maintenance, replacement, and quality-control measures.

High Quality Lighting Equals Good Working Conditions

Lighting conditions and quality of work go hand-in-hand when it comes to commercial facilities. Business owners and building managers are wise to consider the best and most energy-efficient lighting solutions possible in order to provide safe and productive working conditions for their team. LED lights provide quiet, consistent lighting solutions, allowing employees to focus on the task at hand.

Overall, the energy-efficient benefits of LED have long outweighed their traditional lighting predecessors. So, as a business owner or building manager, the next question isn’t whether to make the switch but rather when is the best time? Contact us to make the switch today!

Benefits of Manufacturing Facility Lighting Retrofits

Retrofitting Lighting Systems

Retrofitting a production facility’s lighting has many benefits. So many manufacturing facilities use metal halide high bay fixtures or other fluorescent lighting. While these have advantages over some other systems, LED lighting offers many benefits making a retrofit a sound business decision. Every business wants to lower its operating costs, maximize productivity, and increase employee morale. Installing the latest lighting systems can achieve all three.

Cost-Effective

Cost savings are the obvious benefit. Utility costs can be reduced by as much as 70%, but even a 30 – 50% saving can make a lot of sense when taken over three or four years. This sort of saving not only delivers a quick ROI, but in future years it continues to deliver lower costs. Motion sensors mean that local area lighting can be dimmed when that area is free of activity and instantly fully illuminated when the sensors detect activity.

In many states, there are rebates and incentives to companies which install new lighting and reduce energy use. We are experts in navigating how you can qualify for the rebates and incentives and will handle it on your behalf. Those incentives deliver even faster ROI.

Another potential saving from an LED lighting system is that the heat generated by older systems disappears. That can have a direct impact on cooling needs and A/C costs.

Higher Productivity, Safety, and Morale

Employees working in a well-lit area are less likely to make simple mistakes, for no other reason than they can see exactly what they are doing. Better lighting also improves safety levels. When employees see well, they automatically avoid potential mishaps and accidents. Nothing disrupts productivity and lowers morale like a serious accident.

On a minor note, LEDs do not buzz, so that little irritation disappears, which can also improve morale and productivity.

No Productivity Disruption

We will work around your systems and schedules to ensure your productivity is not disrupted. Many manufacturing facilities have regular preventive maintenance, repair, and new equipment installation events. We can work with your teams to do our work while projects like these are in hand.

The Takeaway

There are many benefits, both immediate and long-term, to retrofit your manufacturing plant’s lighting system. The decision is based on knowledge, so if you would like to learn more and arrange an initial consultation, please just click here to contact us.

Why LED is the Most Energy-Efficient Choice for Cold Storage Lighting

Are you in the grocery or warehouse business and need the right lighting for your cold storage? As a business owner or manager you realize the importance of being cost-effective, that’s why you need to choose the most energy-efficient option. The following are a few items for your consideration as to why LED is the most energy-efficient lighting for your cold storage.

LED lighting for cold storage

As you well know, finding lighting options that do well in cold environments has always been a challenge. Lighting options such as HID and fluorescent have not historically been known to be up to the job when it comes to cold environments. However, LED technology thrives in colder temperatures and do not face the same challenges as other technologies. As for energy efficiency, LED uses less energy than the it’s predecessors which can result immediate reductions in operating costs. The main reason that LED uses so much less electricity than other technologies is that they produce light differently.

How Older Technologies Waste Light

Other technologies produce light through various methods. While incandescent and HID pass electricity through a filament, fluorescent produces light by ionizing mercury vapor. Both methods require extreme heat for its atoms’ electrons to become excited enough to produce light, wasting nearly 90% of the electricity they consume, making them incredibly inefficient. They have a higher probability for failure, limited to a 360 degree beam spread resulting in wasted light, and lack of control capability.

How LED is more energy-efficient

On the other hand, LED produces light using electroluminescence. This process doesn’t use a filament and creates little heat, instead relying on a property of semiconductors to generate light. The methods used to generate light is not the only component of efficiency, equally as important is light distribution, LED has the ability to be directional to maximize the lighting while minimizing energy usage. Of course, the fact that LED doesn’t waste energy by creating or relying on excess heat is also part of what makes them so safe, as well as why they don’t need the large, fragile glass bulbs full of toxic gasses that make handling other lighting sources more difficult.

Here at Relumination, we want to help you find more energy-efficient ways to light your business. If you have any questions about cold storage lighting please contact us today!

Lighting Education: The Importance of Energy-Efficiency

Most of us never really think about how efficient our lighting systems are. Mostly we only care if it turns on when we flick the switch, and if it actually provides enough light to see by. However, when it comes to how much energy our lights are actually burning, you should be concerned, because it affects not just your bottom line, but everyone else’s as well.

Energy efficiency matters for everyone out there, and is something we should all care about. It all starts with your electricity bill.

Your electricity bill is just the cost of doing business, and there’s no way you can avoid it short of installing a self-sufficient energy-generating system on your premises. However, you can reduce what you’re paying by switching to more energy-efficient lighting. For example, by replacing traditional fluorescent lighting system with LED, customer’s would see up to 70% decrease in energy usage. With the upgrade to LED, you’ve now increased the available control capabilities which could provide an additional 20-25% in energy savings. While these upgrades can appear more expensive at first glance, they last years longer and provide the ability for the lighting to grow with the business. Once the upgrade is complete you reap the benefits on the back end by paying less in operating costs, improving safety and quality of the environment which have been proven to result in happier, more productive employees.

However, energy efficiency is sort of like recycling; when everyone gets involved, it makes a significant difference. Imagine, for a moment, if every business cut their electricity demands for lighting in half. The sheer amount of strain that would take off the local power grid is not a small thing. When you calculate it in terms of saved resources, and pollution that’s avoided, it makes an even bigger difference. The less power that’s necessary, the fewer resources we use overall, and the easier it becomes to replace our older, more harmful systems with newer, cleaner ones.

So if you change one bulb to be more efficient, it’s the same as recycling one can. It might not do much on its own, but if you do it every time, and if other business owners, your customers, and your community get involved, it will make huge changes by the time you’ve all combined your efforts.

For more information on how you can start being more energy efficient today, simply contact us today!