Saturday, February 16, 2008

We are GREEN

Green is the way to go on your facility, if you want to save energy and money on your electrical bill. There are many ways to save energy and in the course of this year we will be giving specifics on how and the benefits. Some ways to save energy are the following:

1.- Energy saving bulbs or CFL's. Please try to use quality brand on these, since you want an ROI, that pays for the bulb in less than a year. There are many manufacturers of quality bulbs at competitive prices. Many are made in China, that is why you want a quality brand, behind the product. Try to buy 10,000 to 20,000 hours of life to improve your ROI. In the majority of the cases the bulbs last longer than that, but it depends on the hours use daily.

2.-LED Lights. This is a fairly new technology, that is beeing develop very fast and is getting more and more competitive and efficient for the market. LED Technology in the near future will be the natural substitute in lighting. It is still a very expensive technology, but for the life expectancy (aprox. 50,000 hours), it has a fast ROI. Well keep you posted on the developments of this.

3.- Lighting Retrofits. It is a very usefull way to save energy on large buildings and factories. Tipically it requires that you use an ESCO (Energy Saving Company), to audit your facility. The ROI is very fast, about 1 to 2 years in the States (because of low cost of energy), and 6 to 8 month in parts of the world were the energy costs are higher (aprox $0.21 per kwh in the Dominican Republic). We will give more details in future blogs on how to do this the right way, and what products to keep in mind.

4.- A/C and Heating automation. This is a very good way to save energy on A/C and Heating bills. The simplest form is to buy a Programmable Thermostat (be sure that has communications capabilities, for future upgrades. We recommend Lonworks Open Protocol). This is a very exciting subject and we will be detailing a lot of the best practices in the future. Also we will try to explain concepts on Home and Building Automation.

5.- Lighting Controls. This is also a broad subject that includes, occupancy sensors, lighting control panels, dimming, clocks and timmers. You could reduce your energy bill, by controlling the lighting when it's not needed and this is a basic pilar.

6.- Power Factor Correction. This depends if you are beeing penalized or not. This almost every time applies to industries and large buildings.

There are many other ways to save energy and we are going to talk about many of them in detail on future entries. But remember that if you save energy, you are saving money and more importantly, helping our planet. So be GREEN and save energy.

For comments, please contact us at jaming89@gmail.com or place them in this blog. Thanks.

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