If your hotel is still using incandescent lighting, Mike Connors wants to know why. Sure, the initial cost may be six times higher, but the long-term savings of compact fluorescent lighting are immense. As the CEO of bulbs.com, an online lighting retailer, Connors will happily sell you any kind of lighting, from incandescent and halogen to compact fluorescent and LED.

Connors, who’s been with bulbs.com since 1999 and the CEO since last February, has almost 100,000 commercial clients and estimates that 15 to 20 percent of his business comes from the hospitality industry. With lighting technology changing by the day, or so it seems, we thought it would good to hear what’s new and what hotel owners should be aware of.

What’s going on in the commercial lighting world?
Energy efficiency has really come to the forefront in the last few years. Fuel prices have gone up and there is more and more interest in putting more efficient sources of lighting in. Of course the recession drove a lot more interest in that, too.

Is it just about energy efficiency?
The real balance is in creating the right kind of mood and improving energy efficiency. Both things can be done at the same time. Facility managers’ eyes shouldn’t be taken off one in an effort to achieve the other. You don’t want to create a really great mood and spend through the roof on lighting. Both things can be accomplished, and that maybe wasn’t the case four to five years ago. If you’re running a four-star or five-star hotel, you probably don’t want to have just energy efficient lighting and no mood. You need balance.

So what has changed in the last five years to make that more possible?
The emergence of compact fluorescent lighting. There’s been a lot of improvement in the last four to five years in the type of compact fluorescent lighting that is available. You can go beyond simple spirals that were used in guestrooms to other areas like common areas, lobbies and restaurants. A lot of applications in those areas have hinged on dimming technology. If you’ve ever tried using CFL on a dimmer, the standard ones don’t work very well. Now there are many that do work that way and pretty well from many different manufacturers—some of the big ones to some that aren’t that recognizable on the street. The dimmable compact fluorescent light is the biggest change.

What else is new with compact fluorescent lighting today?
Compact fluorescent lightingproducts are also getting better at reducing the amount of wattage being drawn vs. the number of lumens produced by the light source. A few years ago you needed to buy a 25- or 26-watt CFL to emulate a 100-watt incandescent. Now a 23-watt CFL is pretty common to get the same light output from three to four years ago with the 25-, 26-watt CFL. It may not sound like much, but multiply that by 100 rooms, each with five to seven bulbs, and there are some savings.

Have the prices come down as well in recent years?
Prices have come down. When compact fluorescent lights came out 10 years ago, they were more than $10 apiece and didn’t cover many applications and now a 60-watt equivalent is on the market every day for consumers at $1.59.

Are all hotels using compact fluorescent lighting today?
Believe it or not, many properties still use incandescent in rooms. I recently stayed at a recognizable brand in Boston and the lighting was incandescent. The savings jump from incandescent to CFL has been published many times and you’re looking at 75 percent savings in electricity.

Photo by Cree Inc.

Are there other benefits?
One of those things, and it hasn’t really hit the surface with a lot facility folks, is the difference in CFL and incandescent or LED and incandescent can be a 90-percent difference in the amount of heat given off. Incandescent and halogen are very inefficient and a lot of energy is lost by heat generation. You move to a CFL or LED product and you can reduce heat by as much as 90 percent, which can translate to air conditioning savings.

Really?
What we tell customers is it varies from property to property. The best thing is to have an HVAC engineer do a study with one or two rooms side by side and look at what the actual savings are. It is something that can be measured.

So the lure of incandescents is all about the original cost?
The standard incandescent still purchased by the hotel property for 30-40 cents apiece would be replaced by a 100-watt CFL equivalent for $1.80 or $1.90. There is still a price differential; it’s six times more. But the energy savings are incredible. The standard information out there on lighting is 85 percent of the cost to light almost any common space is consumed by the electric bill. The remaining 15 percent is between labor and the cost of the product. So when our customers are looking at the cost of ownership of lighting, it’s really important to look at long life [which reduces labor in changing bulbs] and energy savings. CFL products are going to last 10 to 12 times longer. Most incandescents last 750-1,000 hours and most CFLs are rated for 10,000-12,000 hours.

Recycling is often the big drawback or concern for someone looking to switch, right?
This is really starting to evolve. We’ve seen the amount of activity in local, state and federal laws starting to come into play the last three years or so and it’s all about the disposal of mercury-containing products. Fluorescent lighting, the older style and compact, all contain trace amounts of mercury. With CFL, education on recycling still needs to be provided. We see it everyday. There’s a huge gap in the amount of knowledge people have in relation to recycling. A great place to point anyone is the website lamprecycle.org. They really do a nice job of updating requirements by state, by federal government and in some cases by city.

So where do you recycle and how much does it cost?
The cost of recycling one mercury retaining light bulb is about $1, but the energy savings from these is still so great over their incandescent and halogen counterparts it is worth it. And there are a growing number of facilities available for recycling. It’s basically as simple as going to the Internet and typing ‘lamp’ or ‘bulb recycling.’ Anyone can find national or probably locally run recycling facilities. What we’re seeing is even retailers like Home Depot or Lowe’s are starting to provide in-store recycling. And it’s going to be like anything else—we’ve seen prices come down in the last couple years and it’s really about how many of these recycling facilities are around. A few years they were so geographically spread out a lot of the cost was freight.

And with CFL and LED products, there are rebates or credits available for their use?
At the beginning of 2009, there were 36 states that had organizations of some kind, from utility to municipal to state, that were offering rebates for the installation of energy efficient lighting. By the end of 2009, there were 46 states.

How does LEED certification play into this?
The impetus on lighting is around reducing mercury in the facility, so that’s why we’re seeing the growing popularity of LED, because it doesn’t contain mercury. Early adopters (of LED lighting) are in most cases companies that have embraced the environment and LEED certification as part of their corporate mission or marketing strategy.

What percent of your business comes from energy efficient lighting?
LED is down in the one to two percent range for us. Other energy efficiency lighting, compact fluorescent and fluorescent, is 30 to 40 percent of our business. Both are going to grow. The challenge for LED is in the measure called lighting efficacy, the number of lumens per watt that are being generated. LED still has a long way to go to generate enough lumens per watt to make the light source generate enough light to light parking lots and garages and big banquet facilities. CFL is going to continue to enjoy growth because of those cost savings, whether they come down anymore in price or not.

What would be your advice to a hotelier looking to switch to CFL or another form of lighting?
This goes for residential customers, too: If a novice at identifying and selecting lighting to use, CFL does have and other energy efficiency lighting will have a different performance characteristic than what you are used to. If you are new at it, start out slow. In the case of a lodging facility, take a couple guestrooms and buy energy efficient lighting and see if it’s lit the way you want. Always take a few small steps before investing in lighting the entire property.