Upgrades and Renovations
LEDs Lead the Way!
Texas organizations like CoServ Electric Cooperative (for example) offer their customers rebates of $2 per LED bulb when replacing less efficient lighting. CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric has a similar plan for its customers, and your own utility likely has some sort of offer.
The payback for LED lighting is already surprisingly short, but those who are interested in helping you conserve energy feel that they need to get you past the direct price comparison. The cost of a single traditional incandescent light bulb might be 50¢; Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs) cost about $2.00; an LED replacement might cost $3.50. A potential customer seeing that might think “why should I pay seven times the price for a light bulb?” Rebates help to level the playing field.
LEDs $ave Money
Rebates are great, of course, but they shouldn’t be necessary when you do the mathematics. A typical household using all incandescent bulbs faces an annual electric bill of about $340 per year just for the lighting. CFLs are much less expensive at about $82 per year. LED lights, on the other hand, cost about $35 per year for the same amount of light.
But there’s more… An incandescent bulb lasts for about 1,000 hours; a CFL bulb can last for 9,000 hours; an LED bulb can last for 50,000 hours. To get an equivalent lifetime, you would need one LED bulb ($3.50), more than five CFLs ($10+) or an astonishing forty-two incandescent bulbs ($21).
Cleaner & Safer
Worse yet, let’s recall that all those burnt out bulbs are headed for a landfill—forty-two regular bulbs, five CFL, or just one LED. And, you had to climb ladders how many times to change those 42 bulbs per socket? Wouldn’t you rather just do that task one time and then forget about it for years?
Upgrades & Renovations
Perhaps you have a vaulted ceiling in the living room that looks both stunning and dramatic. Maybe 16 or 20 feet overhead there are some light fixtures with burned out bulbs because it is just too high for your eight-foot ladder.
Having those remote conventional bulbs replaced or upgraded with LEDs by Illuminations Lighting would mean that you could run them for five hours per day for 27 years before they failed. You would be more likely to buy a new house and move before you ever had a problem with them. Life is all about getting rid of the trivial little problems so you can deal with more important things.
Integration & Aesthetics
Full-range dimmable LEDs provide a lot of latitude for you to set the mood in a particular room. We’ve gotten used to casually adjusting the brightness of incandescent bulbs over the years. In the beginning, CFLs and LEDs did not easily lend themselves to this feature, but now modern LEDs are perfectly capable of this function, eliminating any flickering that was characteristic of the early attempts.
It’s also important to retain the ability to flow from one area to another without a jarring difference. Moving from your warm, dark bedroom to your ensuite should not be met with Arctic White lamps blazing at you.
Neither should your guests be stumbling from a brilliantly lit dining area into a murky reception area, or vice versa. Transitions should feel natural; done properly they should go unnoticed. Have a look at our gallery of finished work for a taste of the possibilities.
The Professional Touch
There is a time and place for the yellowish-red light that we’ve come to associate with an incandescent bulb (called warm white). It makes us feel comfortable and relaxed.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is what we call cool white which is great for utilitarian spaces. This is a high contrast light that tends towards the blue end of the spectrum.
In the middle of the range is natural white, which takes a little from the red-yellow and a bit from the blue, to render something more akin to sunlight, with a faintly greenish cast to it.
Warm white is for your relaxation areas, such as a den; cool white would be suited for your laundry room or workshop; and natural white is for most things in-between. Improper blending can completely counter the intended effect in an area, and it happens all too often when people aren’t aware of the differences.
Retrofitting
If your recreation area has been mistakenly fitted with halogen down lights (because they use less power than incandescent bulbs), you have probably ended up with a severely over-lit area that makes video-watching difficult, or elicits groans when you turn them on after a movie.
We can fix that, and just about any other problem that has arisen from random or simply uninformed lighting choices. If your home is as starkly lit as a 7-11, or as dark as a museum at midnight, give us a call and we’ll get it sorted out for you.
At Illuminations Lighting, we are certified electricians and installers, with an extraordinary reputation that you can count on. We provide commercial lighting systems and solutions as well as house lighting plans in all the areas that we service.
Whether you have a technical problem, or stringent design specifications, we will create the most pleasing and aesthetic designs possible. We will make it exactly right!
We at Illuminations Lighting are delighted to be located in beautiful Houston, Texas, and while we provide service over quite a wide area, we always love to hear from River Oaks, Memorial, West University, Bellaire, Southside, Heights, and Royal Oaks, or whichever part of town you call home…
Don’t be a stranger—give us a ring at 713-863-1133 and say “Howdy!” We would love to hear from you!
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