Tired of breaking the bank just to keep up with the Joneses? Forget fancy cars and other status symbols. How about a way to maintain a friendly neighborly competition that actually involves saving money instead of spending? Americans have a wealth of resources at their disposal to empower families to cut back on energy consumption and reduce their electricity bills, but we don't do a stellar job of taking advantage of that information. Recent research, however, has shown that homeowners are more likely to take efficiency measures with their electrical work when they can compare their own consumption to that of their neighbors.

Whose Bill is the Lowest?

The experiment took place last summer, when the Vermont utility company Green Mountain Power worked with Opower, a software company that specializes in behavioral economics. During very hot days when air conditioning use was expected to be high, the utility reached out to customers with tips on reducing the amount of energy they need to power their home electrical work.

Afterward, the utility gave a report which ranked households in the neighborhood based on how well they had done on cutting back. By the end of the summer, electricity consumption among Green Mountain customers had dropped by five percent during hot days. That's some serious savings!

Peer Pressure at its Best

That five percent resulted from simple behavioral changes like bumping the thermostat up a few degrees and using curtains to block out sunlight during the hottest part of the day – no major investments or new equipment needed, just a little peer pressure. This research should be useful in helping understand what motivates people to save energy in order to develop more effective outreach programs for utility companies around the country.

One of the big takeaways is that the utility didn't give its customers any kind of incentives or payments to change their behavior – just the money they saved through efficiency, and the bragging rights of being more conservation-minded than their neighbors.

"Some of the decisions we make are not entirely rational, and they are due to a lack of context," Kevin Hamilton, Opower's vice president of marketing, said to Utility Drive, "and by providing that context you can encourage individuals to adjust their usage in ways that can benefit both the customer and the utility as well."

Little Changes Mean Big Savings

People come up with all kinds of reasons not to implement efficiency measures: It costs too much in initial capital, they are too busy to think about it, or they simply don't think the savings are worthwhile. But the reality is that even making small behavioral changes can add up in the long run.

If you want to decrease the cost of your electrical work and impress your neighbors, have a qualified home services technician perform an energy audit on your house to identify the most cost-effective ways for you to cut back.

As there are performance standard. All lights that are DLC Qualified have been tested and meet or exceed these requirements. Most recently, DLC has created a higher performance standard, DLC Premium. With DLC Premium, the LED lights are among the most efficient available. For example, our LED Retrofit Kits are DLC Premium Listed, while many of our competitors’ products are only DLC Standard Qualified.

To you, the consumer, this means a DLC Premium retrofit solution will be 20-30% brighter and / or use 20-30% + less energy. Comparing our units at 165 lumens/watt versus a competitive product at 97 lumens per watt, their product requires 135 watts to produce the same amount of light our product needs barely over 75 watts to create. To you, this saves you thousands of dollars month after month. So while both carry the DLC qualification symbol, ours will save you much more every minute the light is turned on.

One of the benefits of retrofitting is you get to recapture the investment in your existing fixtures. Think of a car dealership. Many are beautiful architecturally designed fixtures and the dealership had spent a lot of money to have them installed. The owners would like to convert to LED, but installing a new fixture is not an ideal solution. First, the finished result would not look as aesthetically pleasing as the current appearance. Second, the investment in the existing fixtures would be ‘throw away’. With a LED retrofitting kit, think of the driver as the ballast replacement and the head as a replacement for the metal halide bulb.

Secondly, most of the times a retrofit kit solution is less expensive than a new fixture solution. So not only are you able to recapture your fixture investment, but converting to LED should be cheaper than replacing the fixture with a new LED fixture.

Being DLC Premium Qualified, each kit must be backed with a 5 year warranty. Since our heads are so designed so thermally efficient, the heads have been upgraded to a 10 year warranty. The drivers come with a standard 5 year warranty, but an optional 10 year warranty on the entire unit is available. This means that you should not have to worry about replacing metal halide bulbs and ballasts for 10+ years. For some of our customers, not replacing bulbs and ballasts is almost as if not more important than energy savings provided by converting over to LED.

Our most powerful kit produces close to 51000 lumens while only consuming 350 watts. We believe we have some of the most, if not the most, efficient retrofit kits on the market today. While others are capable of creating 51000 lumens, they need significantly more watts to be able to do so. This is important, because one of the reasons you are probably considering on converting to LED is to save money. But it would be wrong for you to think that all LED solutions are the same in terms of efficiency. Some of our competitor’s kits are rated at 97 and 110 lumens per watt. Our fifth generation of LED retrofit kits are rated up to 165 lumens per watt. This means our competitors are 50% less efficient than our latest models. Over the life of the LEDs, this means you electrical bills are going to be significantly higher than it needs to be. Yes, it will be lower than the current metal halide or high pressure sodium bulbs you may currently be using, but they will cost you significantly more to operate over our latest ultra-efficient retrofit solutions.

The most important thing to do is to match the correct retrofit kit with your existing lighting. We created 11 retrofit kits as part of our family of LED solutions, from 30 watts all the way to 350 watts. Each unit is designed to fit into your existing fixture without the need for taking down the fixture and sending it to use so we can create a custom plate. Some suppliers provide that as their solution. With our 11 retrofit kits, there is no need to take down a fixture and send it to our offices so that we can design you a retrofit plate. Retrofitting Content by MyLEDLightingGuide