Case Study: Exterior LED Lighting

Published August 2015

Many commonly overlooked energy-efficiency opportunities are outside your facility. Well designed lighting will create inviting spaces around the exterior of your business, such as statues, monuments, green spaces, or other landscaping highlights that are lit during non-daylight hours. By completing these projects, you can address an area that is essentially running half of every day. This can be a good place to start saving energy and money with relative ease.

In this exterior LED lighting project, the client was looking for energy efficiency and an aesthetic improvement. In this side by side, you can see the old fixture on the left. It has a large housing and a sizable footprint. Each of the eight fixtures contains two lamps and uses 420 watts. On the right, you can see the new LED fixture. It is more compact, offering a lower profile that is less noticeable during daylight hours and uses only 78 watts per fixture.

 

This post-install photo shows the monument lit at night with the new LED fixtures and a nice white light that is directed onto the sculpture. With LED optics, a space can be designed to put light in areas only where it is needed. This is important to nighttime avoid light pollution. In other nighttime exterior lighting applications this practice of directing light can be applied to lighting walkways or parking lots without letting light spill over into areas where light is not needed, known as light trespass.

 

PROJECT GOALS & SUCCESSES

  • Inefficient Metal Halide fixtures retired & recycled
  • Improved light quality
  • Decreased kWh 92% overall
  • Annual savings over $1100
  • Cut maintenance costs, new fixtures have 5 yr warranty!
  • New fixtures contain no mercury

EQUIPMENT FACTS

  • Sustainable, Energy Saving LED
  • 100,000-hour LED lifespan based on IES LM-80 results
    and TM-21 calculations
  • Cold weather starting to -40

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

CARBON SAVINGS
Total greenhouse gas reduction Metric Tons equivalent to: 8.3

  • Passenger cars not driven for one year 1.6
  • Gallons of gasoline saved 926.4
  • Acres of forest preserved from deforestation 0.08
  • Tons of waste recycled vs. land filled 2.88

Read more about night time light pollution and how good lighting design can help avoid it. If you’re thinking about a lighting project or energy-efficiency upgrades, check out our white paper about the questions you should ask a lighting contractor.