I've seen the light...ing
Posted by Stephen Millward, 28 January 2010 10:59:19
This week I attended a regular industry forum on energy efficiency which I have been going to for more than a decade. Over the years there have been many instances when we've been sitting in a meeting room discussing low energy lighting, whilst the room itself has been lit with a mixture of halogen spotlights and tungsten incandescent tubes, both of which are far from efficient.
As usual we got onto the subject of lighting and I noticed that we were actually sitting in a room which was really very efficient, with a mixture of LED spotlights and CFL bulbs. It's encouraging to see that things are changing. Perhaps in another ten years our meeting rooms will be lit by natural daylight. To be fair, many hotel groups are making significant improvements to their lighting; not least because lighting energy can represent a significant cost.
On the way home, I tuned in to Steve Wright on BBC Radio 2 and heard his 'factoid' feature. The feature stated that it's more energy efficient to leave fluorescent lights on rather than switch them off for short periods of time. He explained that this was due to them using more energy when they initially start up. He's right, but whilst fluorescent lamps do use more energy when starting up, the increase is actually very tiny when compared to their overall energy use.
Personally, I'd always recommend turning the lights off when you leave a room for more than a few minutes. But then I have 'seen the light', as they say...