What are the savings from LED lighting?

We’ve recently written quite a bit here on the INUI blog about LED lighting, including what makes it different to the lighting you may presently be using in your commercial or residential property, and why that’s important. Now, it’s time for us to move onto the subject of the most powerful real-world reason to invest in LED light bulbs: the financial savings they can deliver.

The lighting that lives up to the hype

Much has been said about how profoundly LED lighting differs from almost any other popular way of illuminating a space. But the gist of it all is this: it’s simply more sophisticated and efficient than whatever lighting solution you’re probably using right now. It works on the basis of an electrical current being passed through a semi-conductor, which emits light energy as a result.

It’s a way of creating usable light that also produces minimal energy wastage, and it shows in the relevant figures. To make it easy for you to see just how much you could save by switching to LED lighting, we’ve set up an online LED Lighting Calculator, into which you simply enter a few key details to get the relevant savings figures.

Hugely slash your lighting costs – whatever your premises

So, what are your potential savings from LED lighting when you are responsible for an industrial or warehouse premises? We gave the calculator a go, assuming we have a site that presently uses 20 100-watt light bulbs for eight working hours a day – so literally the ‘9 to 5’. We also stated the electricity cost to be 14.05p per kWh (kilowatt hour), which is what the Energy Savings Trust has calculated this figure to be on average in the UK.

The findings from that straightforward calculation were pretty eye-opening. Assuming all of our current bulbs are traditional incandescent bulbs, it turned out that our current energy consumption was 18.4 kWh, resulting in running costs per year of £943.60.

But if we simply adopted LED light bulbs for all of our fittings, we stood to slash our consumption to a mere 5.52 kWh, meaning new annual running costs of £283.08 – a monster saving of £660.52.

But aren’t leds very expensive to purchase?

This is one thing that remains true, and which serves to potentially erode your savings from LED lighting. However, as the technology becomes more widespread, we are seeing steady drops in the prices of LED bulbs, with most of them now costing less than £10 each, even if the brightest options could still set you back as much as £20.

Nonetheless, even when you’re judging things from the higher end of that price bracket, it’s clear that LED light fittings at your premises could pay for themselves very quickly. Nor do the above figures reflect that LEDs are built to last between 25 and 30 years, so the savings will simply continue to multiply with every passing year.

Looking back to the above cost example, traditional incandescent bulbs costing you £943.60 a year means that by the end of two years, you will have forked out £1,887.20 on lighting alone. By the end of the third year, you’re looking at an accumulative £2,830.80. But when those bulbs are all LEDs, you can expect an accumulative cost of just £566.16 by the end of the second year, and £849.24 once three years are up. That’s a £1,981.56 saving over that time frame.

To boost efficiency and savings, there’s only one choice

All of the above simply affirms what we have long said here at INUI: LEDs aren’t merely more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs due to a much higher percentage of the electricity needed to power them being converted into light, instead of being wasted as heat. That’s because such theorising is backed up by substantial financial savings in real-world situations, for both homeowners and businesses across the UK.

Why hesitate to browse the current selection of innovative, dependable and efficient LED lighting solutions here at INUI, making the most of our extremely competitive trade prices?