Introduction: Virtually every business has lighting needs, whether for office, retail, restaurant or warehouse space. Lighting is a major component of a building's operational costs, about 40% on average. The Smart Lights Program is specially designed to help small businesses cut their energy costs through lighting efficiency, while improving their lighting quality.

Q: Why does the Smart Lights Program only work with small businesses?

A: Small businesses have long been overlooked by traditional energy rebate programs, which have not been able to address the unique needs of small businesses when it comes to making investments in lighting. Namely, small business owners don't have time to become lighting experts so that they can find the right lighting applications and contract with reliable lighting contractors. Also, small businesses often don't have the cash flow to pay for 100% of the lighting costs and then apply for an energy rebate. Smart Lights is designed to assist businesses in overcoming these hurdles.

As a program of the Cities of Berkeley and Oakland, Smart Lights works with the small business community in each city to provide its services. It is a goal of the Program to help these businesses become more competitive through increased efficiency. Saving energy dollars keeps money in the community so that it can be reinvested locally.

Q: What services does the Smart Lights Program offer?

A: The Smart Lights Program offers full service technical assistance, project management, and upfront discounts on lighting installation costs.

Q: What happens when I participate in the Smart Lights Program?

A: Once you contact the Smart Lights Program, we send you a one-page enrollment form. When we get that enrollment form back, we send out an independent lighting specialist that assesses your lighting needs, specifies an efficient lighting retrofit, and estimates the energy savings of the retrofit. From this assessment, we are able to tell you how much money you could save per year, how much the lighting retrofit will cost, what type of discount the Program will provide, and how much time it will take for the energy savings to pay for your investment.

If you decide to go with the retrofit, the Smart Lights Program schedules the installation with a pre-screened lighting contractor. We do quality control checks on the installation to make sure everything is installed correctly.

Q: What types of discounts does the Smart Lights Program offer?

A: We offer two types of discounts. First, we will pay the lighting contractor a certain portion of the installation costs. This means that the discount portion will not come out of your pocket. The discount is based on the estimated energy savings realized by your project. These discounts range from 25% to 100%, the average being between 40% and 60%.

Second, we have negotiated volume discounts on fixture costs with the lighting contractors participating in the program. This means that the total project costs, even before the discount, is much lower than what you could get as a small business working with an independent contractor.

Q: Can I use my own contractor instead of those that are participating in the Smart Lights Program?

A: Yes, you can use your own contractor; however, the benefits of the Program will be slightly different. If your contractor specifies the job, we will need to verify those specifications in order to calculate the discount. We will also need to charge a fee to perform a quality control check on the finished job, as we have not screened your contractor in the same way that the Smart Lights contractors have been screened.

In addition, you will be responsible for managing the contractor and paying the contractor the full costs of the project. The discount will be reimbursed to you directly upon completion of the quality control check. You will need to give us your City of Berkeley or City of Oakland business license number in order for us to process the check.

Q: How can I contact the Smart Lights Program?

A: Call us at (510) 981-7750. Or email us at smartlights@EBenergy.org. Our webpage is www.EBenergy.org/cescsmartlights/.

Q: Fluorescent lights flicker and buzz, and my employees will just complain. Why should I install them?

A: New fluorescent lights provide steady and even lighting with no buzzing or flickering. The new T8 lights have electronic ballasts, unlike the magnetic ballast old fluorescent lights have. Magnetic ballast lamps hum at about 120 cycles per second, which some people perceive as a flicker. New electronic ballasts operate at about 24,000 cycles per second, eliminating the flicker. The "buzzing" is also gone, since there is no magnetic "pulsing" happening.

Q: The color from the fluorescent lights is usually too blue. How are the new fluorescent lights different?

A: New fluorescent lamps come in clean white colors, nearly identical to incandescent lamps. New T8 lamps are very similar to incandescent lamps, and can be ordered in warm, medium or cool colors, so they can be used in a variety of applications, from retail sites to warehouses, with excellent results. The lower lights might be good in a small meeting room or lounge, or where computers are used, while the higher temperature is good for tasks such as writing, filing, mail sorting, reading labels, etc.

To expand, color has two components-temperature and color rendition. Temperature refers to how we perceive the light itself coming from a lamp. A lower temperature, around 1,500 degrees Kelvin (equivalent to sunrise/sunset) is ruddy and dim, whereas a temperature around 5-6000 degrees Kelvin (equivalent to noontime summer sunlight) is much harsher. The most pleasing indoor light temperatures are around 2,700 to 3,500 degrees Kelvin. New fluorescent lights provide this range of temperature and offer brighter more pleasing lighting solutions for your business.

The second component, color rendition, is how the light makes objects appear. For instance, those orangey sodium vapor streetlights have a very low color rendition index (CRI) of about 30, while an incandescent lamp has a CRI in the low 90's. The new fluorescent lights have a similar CRI to incandescents, ranging in the mid-80's.

Q: We already have fluorescent lights that work fine-why should we remove them and reinstall new fluorescent fixtures?

A: Besides the improved light color and elimination of buzzing and flickering, new fluorescent lamps are lower in wattage, by about 35 watts per fixture. Each fixture you replace with a new energy-saving fixture will save you money.

For the typical business that has lights on for 10 hours per day, six days a week, this means each fixture will save nearly 118 kilowatt hours a year, every year. [(35 x 10 hours x 6 days x 56 weeks) divided by 1,000 watts = 117.6 kWh]. For a site with 50 fixtures, the savings would be 5,880 kWh, or about $950.00 per year.

Consider upgrading lighting systems if you currently use incandescent lights or older fluorescent lights.

Q: What is the environmental impact of throwing out working light fixtures and replacing them with these new ones?

A: Under the Smart Lights program, all light fixtures will be salvaged for scrap metal, and all lamps will be recycled safely, instead of being tossed into waste containers and sent to the landfill. Over the lifetime of a single T8 lamp you will save $70-80 in electricity, save over 500 kilowatt hours of electricity (the same amount delivered by burning about 500 lbs. of coal) and prevent the release of 500 lbs. of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

Q: I have some lights that are inadvertently left on for long periods of time. How can Smart Lights help me automate my lighting system?

A: There are two simple ways to solve this problem. The Smart Lights Program can provide assistance and incentives for both. One way is to install an occupancy sensor that will automatically turn lights off when no one is in the room. This is especially useful in conference rooms, rest rooms, or locations that have only occasional use. A second method is to install a photocell that senses how much daylight is entering a room, and powers down the lights to pre-set levels. This is helpful in offices, or older buildings that have lots of natural daylight available, but interior lights are on.

Photocells and occupancy sensors can reduce energy costs in many applications-the amount of savings will vary according to the site.

Q: Doesn't it take more energy to turn lights back on rather then leave them on? And doesn't it wear the fluorescent lamps out faster?

A: The answer to both questions is "no"-the very short surge of energy used when lights are switched on is much less than the energy used by lights left on for more than five minutes. It is true, turning fluorescent lamps on and off will shorten their life, but usually it is only a matter of a few hours-new fluorescent lamps will last about 27,000 hours on average (about 6,700 starts), so even shortening the life of the bulb by five hundred hours isn't a very large impact.