Being Good Stewards by Changing a few Light Bulb

Grace Church has been working for several years to make our lighting more efficient and better quality.  Throughout most of our parish building we have upgraded to electronic ballast fluorescent T-8 fixtures, but have been struggling replacing the remain high wattage incandescent lights in our parish hall because they need to be dimmable and are 150W flood lights.


One afternoon, with my daughter helping, we replaced all 26 of our 150W spot lights with high-efficiency 17W dimmable LEDs.  We were able to get a $40 rebate on each bulb through a MassSave Commercial Lighting Rebate, bringing down the cost to $13 each.


I'm excited by the reactions we go during the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper, which was the first evening event since we changed the bulbs:

"I love the new lights!"
"They will really help the older members of the parish."
"They're really bright in a good way."

Here is what we replaced:

• 9 @ 150W incandescent flood lights
• 3 @ 75W incandescent flood lights
• 5 @ 100W halogen flood lights

Burnt out or missing:

• 6 @ 150W incandescent flood lights
• 2 @ 100W halogen flood lights
• 1 missing entirely

with 22 Philips 17W EnduraLED PAR38 22° Flood and 4 Sylvania 18W UltraLED PAR38 40°.  Both are 75W flood light equivalents.

Four different varieties of flood lights that were in our parish hall.

Two styles of LED PAR38 lights we installed and one of
the track light flood fixtures with an old incandescent bulb

	# of Bulbs	Wattage (W)	Annual electricity usage* (kWh)	ElectricityCost per year at 15.5¢/kWh
Functioning Lights	17	150	2,652	$411
With all bulbs functioning	26	150	4,056	$629
Going forward with LEDs	26	17	460	$71

* at 20 hours of usage per week

So, we should actually save about $340 per year on our electric bill and not consuming 2,200 kWh which will reduce our annual green house gas CO2 emissions by about 2,000 pounds per year.

Even better than the electricity savings and emissions reductions each year, will be not having to replace the bulbs.  With a 45,000 hour life, these LEDs should last over 40 years. I won't have to go up that ladder to replace burnt out bulbs.  I do not know how many bulbs we were replacing each year, but that should be a nice savings as well.


You may have noticed that we replaced mostly 150W bulbs with 75W equivalent LEDs.  Now that we have all 26 fixtures working again (9 were burnt out or missing their bulb) our effective illumination is only down a few percent.  We may come back and add some additional fixtures to the existing tracks, but may not need to given that all of the LED's light is directed where we want it while only a portion of the incandescent lights was.  I was really glad that the existing dimmers functioned without any flicker or problems so we did not need to rewire anything.

Funding for this project came in part from the Green Grant Program from the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts and is part of a larger project that is also looking to upgrade the remaining 300W incandescent bulbs in our historic sanctuary to high-efficiency LEDs while pleasantly increasing the light quality.

Peace,
Jon