A cost that many business owners don’t consider is the price of parking lot lighting and illumination. By keeping your lot well lit, you encourage more post-sunset business, keep your employees safer during opening and closing, and help deter crime after hours. Unfortunately, they also use a significant amount of electricity – the parking lot alone could cost you thousands of dollars each year. There are ways of reducing the amount of energy consumed by your parking lot lights, though. Some utility companies even offer incentives or rebates when you switch to more energy-efficient lighting systems for your business!
Existing Lots
If you’ve had your business and parking lot for a while, odds are you don’t want to go through the trouble of replacing all the fixtures and poles in addition to the lights themselves. Luckily, most fixtures can easily be modified to work with LED bulbs. These LED lamps cost more upfront but have significantly longer lifespans than the traditional high-intensity discharge or metal halide lamps. The process of changing them to LED fixtures isn’t a huge overhaul–your trusted local electrician will use a bucket truck to access the fixtures, rewire them to suit the LED lamps, and make a few more specific adjustments so that the lamps will sit snugly. Though retrofitting the fixtures takes a bit of time at first, when you eventually need to replace the LED bulbs, it’s a simple job to unscrew the old one and insert the new one.
New Parking Lots
Perhaps your building is quite old, and the fixtures are outdated or improperly spaced to distribute light evenly. Or, you may have purchased a lot and are building your office and parking lot brand new. When you’re choosing new fixtures to install, LED-fitted fixtures are your best bet for energy savings. Again, they’ll be a bit more costly upfront, but they will last years longer than traditional bulbs do and will use significantly less energy. They will pay for themselves in electric bill savings within the first couple of years. Light fixtures made for LEDs tend to help the bulbs last even longer than ones retrofitted from halide fixtures because the LED fixtures are created with more space between the circuits and heat sink. This means there’s less of a chance of the bulb overheating, which in turn increases the lifespan.
Timing of Parking Lot Lighting
Reducing the usage by even just one hour a night can save a good amount of money over time. While it’s easy just to put your lights on a fixed schedule and not think about it after that, you could look into adjusting the light schedule to account for the extended daylight during the summer. By shortening the length of time they are on during the summer, you’ll save some money to account for the slightly longer winter nights.
There’s no getting around the high cost of operating parking lot lighting. With LED lights though, your parking lot will be well-lit for longer and will cost significantly less than the excessive amount you pay with metal halide or high-intensity discharge lamps.
Promise Electric is Sarasota’s premier electrical services company. We service both residential and commercial accounts and have the expertise to handle installations of any kind. No matter the size and scope of your electrical project, call us today for more information and a quote.
