How to Conserve Energy and Reduce Your Power Bills

Posted on: 12 October 2022

High bay lighting, which is also commonly known as warehouse lighting, can make a surprisingly substantial impact on the overhead costs of many businesses. Whether you operate a warehouse or another business that requires lighting installed on tall ceilings, it's worth considering how you can improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of your lighting.

Far from being a simple matter of selecting some bulbs and moving on, high bay lights can be a major purchasing decision and long-term investment. This guide will go over three of the easiest options for improving the efficiency of your high bay lights and reducing your overall warehousing lighting utility costs.

1. Focus on Efficiency Specifications

While it might seem obvious, it's easy to overlook lighting specifications that can impact your long-term costs. For example, it's common to consider cost and light output (typically measured in lumens) when purchasing high bay lights. These two values can give you a reasonable idea of the upfront cost to light your space, but they give you a poor idea of your long-term operating costs.

Instead, a more relevant specification is worth considering: lumens per watt. A light's efficiency can vary for many reasons, including its reflector design, size, and the number and type of LEDs present. Whatever the case, lumens per watt will give you a straight comparison that you can use to compare the efficiency of two similar lights.

2. Choose Appropriate Lighting

The two most common styles of high bay light fixtures are round or linear, but there's significant variation within these groupings. For example, different lights will have different beam angles, affecting where the light shines and its pattern as it reaches the floor. These characteristics can impact the amount of light available to your workers.

Maximizing efficiency means choosing appropriate lights for your application. For example, linear lights with a tighter beam pattern are typically better suited to aisles. These designs waste less light on the tops of your shelves, allowing you to achieve more with a less power-hungry light. Keeping these factors in mind as you choose your lights will help keep your long-term costs down.

3. Convert to LEDs

If your facility still uses old-style fluorescent lights or some other technology, converting to LEDs is arguably the best bang for your buck in terms of energy efficiency. Instead of replacing your lights one at a time, a full conversion to LEDs will likely save your facility a significant amount of money by removing needless energy wasted as heat.

According to the EPA, traditional lights waste as much as 90% of their energy as heat. Installing new, energy-efficient LEDs will allow you to use that energy to light your facility instead of emitting it into your building as unnecessary waste heat.

Contact a supplier for more information about lights like LED high bay lights.