If you stepped into our Canton store on Ford Road in the summer of 2013, you’d have noticed that it was sweltering. It wasn’t that hot outside, and the air conditioning was working just fine. A major reason for the heat was that we had endless rows of hundreds and hundreds of halogen light bulbs burning. As my dad always jokes, halogen bulbs are really mini-furnaces with light as the by-product.
It needs to be bright in our stores, customers need to see the details in the furniture. It also needs to be comfortable and not overheated. Our solution was to replace our old halogen light bulbs with light-emitting diode (LED) technology from Philips Lighting. Non-technophiles (i.e. all of us) can understand that a cluster of light-emitting diodes makes up LEDs. This technology has been around forever, you’ve seen them as the small indicator lights on electronic devices. The change there is that the quality has greatly improved over time. The cost has also gone way down so that they’re now a more practical choice for homes and businesses. More on LED technology is available here on the US Department of Energy’s site.
The Benefits of LED Lighting
For us at Gardner White, the benefits of converting to LEDs were immediate. First, and probably not surprisingly, furniture looks better when you can actually see it. Efficient LED lights also allowed us to reduce the number of lights throughout our store by more than 30%. Second, the temperature in the stores during summer was a comfortable 72 degrees. This stopped the air conditioning from constantly working on overdrive, which made the Canton store a much happier place. Third, we don’t need to constantly replace these bulbs. This saves on the cost of replacement and allows our building maintenance teams more freedom. Lastly, the payback on this investment was less than one year. Gardner White is actually saving money by having made this investment.
For me, this project was edifying. In 2009, I was working in Washington, DC on clean technology, we tried to install LEDs in the White House. Problem was, the technology wasn’t as mature at the time, it made the Blue Room look like a hospital ward! It was pretty cool to see how the light from these LEDs was actually better than a halogen bulb. It’s only been a few years, but technology has come a very long way.
Philips Lighting was a great partner on this project – check out their write-up here: Gardner White Case Study
— Rachel T., President of Gardner White
