Why Invest in a Lighting Audit?
Published December 2014
Energy-efficiency is a direct path to savings and makes a positive impact to the bottom line for many businesses, but you may be wondering “What’s the point in investing in a lighting study,” or investment grade audit? We believe there is a singular and simple reason why an Investment Grade Audit is the best way to help prepare for your lighting project investment.
Whether you purchase your study from TRC, another energy service company, electrical contractor, retrofitter, engineer, or architect, our theory is really simple: You shouldn’t have to become a lighting expert to expertly buy a complicated lighting project.
More often than not, you want to invest in a lighting upgrade because it makes sense for your business to do so. However, you may not have considered why an investment grade lighting study is the best way to begin. It’s the first decision you can make that will allow every consecutive decision to take off in the right direction and result in a successful lighting project.
With an investment grade audit you have an RFP you can submit to several vendors. Inviting several firms in to your business to bid the work you want done will inevitably result in an equal number of very different bids left for you to compare. An Investment Grade Audit arms you with a standardized bid document where fixture counts, operating hours, equipment specs, and every other possible project variable -aside from vendor- are the same, making your job slightly easier. With all the “lighting expert” variables accounted for and all the critical data already collected, you can be sure the project proposals provided by multiple vendors allows you to compare “Apples to Apples.”
Your job at that point is to choose a vendor based on price, reliability, availability, experience, corporate buying preferences, or whatever credentials make the most sense for your business. Investing in a lighting study means you’ve taken the first step toward due diligence. You have reduced the likelihood that you could have been presented with a good looking project based on sub-par data.
To help you in decision making when trying to choose the right partner for your investment grade audit, here are the categories of reports included in an Investment Grade Audit from The Retrofit Companies:
- In-depth details on your existing lighting system
- Existing energy cost benchmarking
- In-depth details on the proposed (new) lighting system
- Proposed system operating costs & annual savings
- Line by line cost-benefit analysis
- Operational and Maintenance savings comparisons
- Fixture cut sheets for proposed equipment
- Photometric layouts for existing and proposed
- Rebate studies & submittal forms
For full explanations of the reports listed above and for more information about Investment Grade Audits, download our e-book here: