Better, Brighter, More Energy-Efficient Lighting

In 2007, the owners of 26 Shoppers Drug Mart stores across British Columbia were looking for ways to reduce their operating costs without compromising the “look” their customers had come to expect. Their solution: install energy-efficient lighting. The result: even better than they imagined.

“Upgrading our store lighting to more energy-efficient technologies is not only saving us money,” says Norm Peck, Director of Store Premises Services for Shoppers Drug Mart, “but has also enhanced the appearance of our merchandise displays.”

Because lighting accounts for the largest portion of the electricity bill for most retail stores, the Shoppers Drug Mart owners decided to start their hunt for operational savings by consulting with BC Hydro about ways to reduce their energy costs. The owners ended up working closely with BC Hydro’s Power Smart Product Incentive Program (PIP) to decide first which energy-efficient technologies would work best in their retail environments.

The PIP experts recommended the stores:

• remove all unnecessary fixtures (over-lamping is common in retail)
• replace the 90-watt halogen lamps used for accent lighting with 25-watt ceramic metal halide lamps, and
• upgrade the 32-watt T8 fluorescent lamps in their ceiling fixtures to reduced-wattage T8s.

Following that advice, the store owners together retrofitted more than 17,000 lamps, for a combined energy savings of nearly 1.5 gigawatt hours of electricity–or more than $72,000–a year. That’s a reduction of a remarkable 10 per cent on each store’s energy bills. And because the new lamps last far longer than the old ones, they will require far less ongoing maintenance, reducing the stores’ costs even more over the long term.

At the same time, PIP provided over $30,000 towards the owners’ upfront costs for installing the new energy-efficient lamps, significantly reducing the payback time for the retrofits.

Already happy with great energy savings, lower maintenance costs and a fast payback time, the store owners were over the moon with the responses they received as soon as the new lighting went in. Employees and customers alike went out of their way to tell the owners about how much brighter, more attractive and comfortable they found the stores.

Since those first 26 stores received their retrofits in 2007/2008, 30 to 40 more of the 118 BC Shoppers Drug Mart stores have received or are planning lighting upgrades. But pharmacies are not the only retail stores that can benefit from the new trend toward energy-efficient lighting.

For any store, simply changing from old-fashioned incandescent to compact fluorescent light bulbs in displays and ceiling fixtures will result in significant savings: CFLs use about 75 per cent less energy than standard incandescent bulbs to produce the same amount of light–and they last about eight times as long: an average of 8,000 hours compared with fewer than 1,000 hours for an incandescent bulb.

Your exit signs, too, are an easy fix. Most traditional exit signs are lit by two incandescent lamps that draw 24 to 40 watts of power. That means a single exit sign could cost you as much as $30 per year on your energy bills. Even more, because exit signs have to be on all the time and traditional incandescents burn out extremely fast (in less than one year), you’re buying new bulbs and up on a ladder again in no time. LED exit signs, on the other hand, use just 1 to 3 watts of power–about 90 per cent less than incandescents–and last an amazing 100,000 hours, or more than 11 years. Your energy consumption goes down, you save money immediately on your monthly energy bills, and you reduce your operational and maintenance costs for years to come.

Other quick retail fixes include:

• Changing your old T12 fluorescents to energy-saver T8s. Energy-saver T8 fluorescent lamps are 50 per cent more efficient than T12s, and virtually eliminate lamp flickering. They’re also better looking and offer better colour quality.

• Switching your standard halogen lamps to halogen infrareds, which use up to 50 per cent less energy and produce less heat (which could help you save on your air conditioning costs, too), while achieving the same light quality. A 60-watt halogen infrared lamp will provide the same quality of light as a 90-watt standard halogen lamp.

• Upgrading your exterior lighting. High-pressure sodium or metal halide lamps use 74 per cent less energy than outdoor incandescent or mercury vapour lamps, while providing a similar amount of light. If you require fast start and re-strike (you want your lights to turn on again quickly after being turned off), consider using metal halide lamps with Pulse Start technology. These new lamps consume up to 20 percent less energy than the normal metal halide lamps, plus they last longer and can start and re-strike very quickly.

A free consultation with BC Hydro Product Incentive Program will reveal even more ways to save, while actually improving your store’s current merchandise display lighting and overall ambience. To find out more visit bchydro.com/incentives or call 1-866-522-4713.

Written by: Robin J. Miller