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Photo of County employee replacing a lighting unit.

The County's lighting retrofit saves taxpayers more than $350,000 per year.

Lighting Retrofit

Switching to energy-efficient lighting in your home saves money on your energy bill while reducing your carbon footprint. Imagine these benefits on a much larger scale. In 2009, the County completed a lighting retrofit of 26,000 fixtures in over 3 million square feet at 52 county owned & leased buildings.

The new lighting:

  • gives off a wider spectrum of light, whiter and closer to daylight
  • uses 30% less electricity with lamps lasting 6,000 hours longer than older lighting
  • Reduced mercury at County facilities by about 350,000 milligrams

Annual Savings (projected):
Electricity: 2,921,000 kilowatt-hours
Taxpayer Dollars: $350,000

How We Did It

We replaced older T-8 fluorescent lamps and retrofitted electronic ballasts with 5,000 Kelvin T-8 lamps and third generation electronic ballasts. High intensity discharge (HID) lighting fixtures were replaced with new T-8 fixtures.