By Joe Salimando www.eleblog.com
Lightfair is a huge trade show, with a gigantic educational component. To generalize on what was said and displayed at the 2011 event – other than the focus on LEDs – would not be good reporting. I did a lot of wandering around at the event; here’s some of what is “starred” in my notebooks.
Payback on Lighting Retrofits
Stan Walercyzk, a California lighting genius, spoke about the overlooked savings from an investment in improving a building’s lighting. A pure-math point he made, with which you cannot argue, is this: Most of the savings produced by a lighting retrofit come AFTER the payback period.
This is simple math. Let’s say a lighting retrofit costs $100,000 and saves $25,000 – that’s a four-year payback. But what happens in years 5 to 20? That’s 16 years x $25K = $400,000 in savings.
So the math is: $100,000 invested, $500,000 saved. Many lighting proposals tend to stop at the payback, Walercyzk said; maybe we should be going further.
Walercyzk also covered the “soft” savings from a lighting retrofit – which is, of course, what any building owner or tenant gets from providing better-quality lighting in a workplace. Better lighting = better productivity. All kinds of “Green” lighting research is showing this (for workplaces, schools & even healing in hospitals!).
Think about a typical workday: 480 minutes (8-hour day). Let’s say better lighting makes a worker 1% more productive – a conservative estimate. That’s 5 more minutes of work output that the employer gets from the worker.
What’s an average worker paid? How many workers does the company for which you are doing the retrofit employ at that location? Walercyzk said that, when you pencil this out, you’ll probably discover that the productivity gains from a lighting retrofit “dwarf” the $ of energy savings.
Boomers, Vision + Lighting
One session featured three experts on lighting for the aged. These people scared me just a bit about some of the decisions we take in the U.S. – without considering what we are throwing away or making difficult.
Note that, while my hearing has gone to Hell and my teeth are just awful, eyesight is one area in which I’ve been extremely lucky (genetically speaking). So this wasn’t a personal issue; I choose this session because of the number of people (around the world) who are getting old and . . . and, well, they continue to go on living!
Some bullets:
- Every day, 10,000 people in the U.S. celebrate the first anniversary of their 64th birthday.
- 23% of U.S. residents will be age 65 by the year 2036. And: 19% of those age 70-plus have visual impairment. Those facts maybe don’t seem to go together – but it can safely be presumed that, short of a world pandemic, most of the people who reach age 65 will also get to the other side of 70.
- 70% of those who get to the other side of age 75 have cataracts. Macular degeneration is a problem for 33% of the 75%.
- There’s a “loss of contrast sensitivity” as you age; this limits the independence of old people. Without sharp vision, they are uncomfortable in unfamiliar settings. They fall down more as a result; falls are not good for older people. And even without the falls, as vision declines, the quality of life decreases.
There was lots more.
What’s all of this got to do with electrical contractors? Several things:
1. We’re adjusting our energy codes and standards, but many of these efforts (like the one to lower “lighting power density”) make it harder for those with impaired vision to prosper in a given workplace..
2. One speaker came out and said it: “70-year-olds will be competing with 20-year-olds for entry-level jobs.” You can debate the reasons for this (someone didn’t save enough for his retirement, some are bored in retirement, etc.) . . . but the net impact is, if you provide too little light in the workplace, you are making it impossible for the 70-year-old job applicant to successfully compete. The 20-year-old needs about one-third the amount of light!
3. There is an “aging in place” trend. People want to live in the houses they have lived in, but those houses need adjusting. Some of it has to do with making doorways wider, but much of it is electrical/lighting . . . putting more lights in (to give the occupants more options, depending on time-of-day and task(s) to be performed) . . . strip LED lights on stairways, to make descending safer.
There’s more now, and likely to be much more developed in the near future. Consider a newfangled thing like pressure sensors in the carpet beneath one’s bed. The minute old Joe Salimando puts a tentative foot out of his bed and onto the floor, the lighting comes up (gently).
From a contractor revenue point-of-view, the aging eye session and Stan W’s productivity/retrofit thinking were the most relevant items I heard and saw at Lightfair. There was a lot more, of course; LEDs were everywhere, and there was a mini-focus on lighting controls.
However, a couple of other items stood out in my notes:
In the aging session, a speaker addressed research on lighting and how it affects people with alzheimer’s. Now, there is a simple “rule of thumb” on alzheimer’s disease:
- If you live to be 65, there’s a 50% chance you’ll live to be 85.
- If you live to be 85, there’s a 50% chance you’ll have alzheimer’s disease.
- Do the math, and it seems to say that 25% of those who get to the other side of age 85 will have some form of alzheimer’s.
No matter how you personally feel about that, remember – 23% of the U.S. will be age 65 or older by 2036 . . . what does that mean for lighting? I don’t know, but it seems to indicate we’ll need to do things differently, and soon.
One speaker said research seems to be showing that better lighting helps people cope with alzheimer’s. This clearly is not a short-term revenue item for ECs reading this . . . but it sure might have some possibilities on down the road.
Another speaker, from Acuity Brands Lighting, took listeners through current thinking on OLEDs (organic LEDs). These might be a decade or more away, in terms of products that might be bought in bulk. They are probably not going to be “A”-type light bulbs.
However, the OLED promise has been – and remains, going by this speaker’s remarks – a chance to reshape lighting. OLEDs won’t have to be point sources. They can be used to shape the ambiance of a room in ways that no one in lighting design can even dream of these days. The possibilities with OLEDs are stupendous in comparison with the way we today use of standard LEDs, CFLs, linear fluorescents, and even incandescents.
It was an exciting talk. I hope I live to see it; and I hope that, if I do so, I’m aware of what’s going on around me when it happens!