Energy savings in residential communities with LED lighting

In neighborhood communities, electricity consumption can be the main expense that the owners have to face. One of the points where we can reduce costs significantly is the part of the consumption that is dedicated to lighting and the easiest saving method is to switch to LED.

To carry out the replacement of all the luminaires of a community of neighbors is convenient to inventory and review what we have installed at present to see what alternatives we have.

1. To review the current lighting of the community of neighbors

The first thing to do is to make a list of everything that is currently installed. As an example we will use a small building of five floors, with two houses per floor, and garage.

In this case we have ceiling lights with 100W bulbs on each floor, at the entrance of the building and the access to the garage, 120cm fluorescent tubes in the garage and 60cm tubes in the elevator. In total the consumption would be:

We are talking about € 680 per year of the electricity bill corresponding to the consumption of lighting.

2. Search for equivalent LED bulbs

Now we are going to look for efficient alternatives to the different devices we have installed:

• Where we have 100W incandescent bulbs we will install 12W A60 LED bulbs. With just over 1,100 lumens they are more than enough to light the small landings on each floor.
• For the LED tubes, which we will use in the garage and elevator lighting, the choice is simple as it is conditioned by the length of the tubes. What we have to take into account is that when installing the new tubes we will eliminate the ballasts to reduce consumption as much as possible.

3. Amortization of LED lighting

With the changes made the monthly consumption would be as follows:

In total less than 200€ per year. Thus we have reduced the bill by €481.25. Let’s look at the cost of the installed products to calculate the amortization period:

If the total cost is 56.03€ and the monthly saving is 40.10€ we have amortized the investment in 42 days (1.4 months).

4. Tips to further reduce the electricity bill in your community

To further reduce electricity costs we can check if the power we have contracted is really adjusted to what is needed in the common areas of the community of neighbors.

We can also incorporate presence detectors or timers, if we do not already have them, which will allow us to optimize consumption.

Finally, it is not unreasonable to consider a change of company. The savings are not high, but every euro counts in the long run.

This small example is intended to show that LED lighting is something that, at current prices, is very cost-effective. The time when the lights in the house or building were amortized within 3 or 4 years is over.