Why We Love our Customers:

As Fresh as All Outdoors

Recently, as we were going through the mail, we were reminded of a delightful landscaping lighting project we designed and built for one of our clients.  It was a great redesign, eliminating old power-hungry bulbs that are leftovers from 1890, two centuries ago, from when they were invented.

Old Tom Edison may have commercialized the incandescent light bulb and revolutionized the entire world while he was at it, but times change.  You don’t stick with something, despite improvements, just because it was first.

Innovation

The person that first lashed together two saplings and made a sledge, so s/he could more efficiently drag many possessions around with them did not stick to that relentlessly after the wheel was invented.  We all moved on to wagons, and then tamed beasts to help us pull them, and built engines that could drive them…

Electric Light

Incandescent light bulbs are only about 10% efficient, wasting 90% of their energy as heat.  Cooler bulbs, such as fluorescents, last about eight times longer and use much less energy.  They don’t cover an extensive part of the spectrum; they tend to hum and buzz; but mostly, they are not very artful.

LEDs

Modern lighting is now often driven by LEDs.  They can create any imaginable color, any needed brightness or intensity.  They last 50-200 times longer than an incandescent, they’re not costly to buy, and they sip electricity at about 10% of the rate of filament bulbs.

Economical

If you operated a 60w incandescent bulb for a full year (8,760 hours), that would consume 525,600 watts of electricity, for just one bulb.  Imagine how many bulbs you have, and what their total consumption might be.  Staggering, isn’t it?

Even if we divide by 1,000 to make the number easier to manage, that would be 525.6 kilowatt-hours (kW/hour) per year.  If your rate per kWh is 10¢, that would be $52.56 for each 60w lightbulb.

A Friendly Note

Our customer, Arjun Selvakumar from Houston, saw the wisdom in this, electing to go with LED lighting to fulfill his landscaping needs. He wrote:

Thanks for all your assistance in educating me on LED lighting and guiding me through the design process.  Experience does matter!

You’re very welcome, Arjun!  We always take the time to measure and test; we install temporary fixtures to make sure that you won’t get a blazing light directly in the eyes from any normal viewing angle.  After all, Lighting Design is not a “hope for the best” procedure—success follows on the tails of careful preparation, measurement, knowledge, and experience.

He really turned our heads by saying:

Your guys are awesome!  Our new landscape lighting looks great.  Josh and his assistant did a great job.

And, through all the blushing, we had to agree that it did look fantastic.  We love a challenge, where something is technically difficult to the degree that other Electrical Contractors turn tail and run!  Bring us your toughest problems because we have the solution!

The Takeaway

In the end, we want to make sure that our customers and future clients understand that we do it all—and we do it well!  It doesn’t matter whether you need a backup power generator, or you need to get electricity to a remote outbuilding.  If you desire, we can create a maintenance contract for all your electrical needs, so you never have to change that spotlight in the corner of the 25-foot high ceiling ever again.

Talk to us—we have your answers!

Call the electrical experts you can trust at Illuminations Lighting Design.  We would love to hear from you, so pick up the phone and give us a call at 713-863-1133 or toll-free at 800-863-1184, so you can learn more before we begin your journey towards perfect lighting, indoors or out.We’re based in Houston, Texas, but in truth, ILD is the only “one-stop” destination for lighting design services, engineering, landscape lighting services, and installation in the whole state of Texas.  And to top it off we are unrivaled by any lighting firm in the United States for lighting that is art, which is why we’re called upon to light the best art collections all over the country.