Most buildings have LED. Very few have smart lighting, and that is where the next savings are.
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Most schools, town buildings and businesses in New England have already switched to LED, and that was the right first step. An LED fixture draws far less power than the fluorescent tube it replaced, and those savings are real and lasting.
But LED changed how much power a light uses while it is on. It did not change when the light is on, or how bright it runs. Nationally, fewer than one in every hundred commercial lights is networked to that kind of control, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
What smart lighting means
In a smart lighting system, the sensors are integral to each fixture, built in rather than mounted on a wall. The industry calls this luminaire-level lighting control, or LLLC, and the definition matters: in a true LLLC system, the fixtures are networked and every fixture has at least two sensor functions, usually occupancy and daylight. A single motion sensor on each light, working on its own, is not the same thing.
Day to day, lights brighten when people come in and dim or turn off when a room empties. Fixtures beside a sunny window ease back, and nobody has to remember the switches.
An example: the school gym
Take a middle school gym with LED and no controls. The lights come on when the custodian arrives and run at full brightness until the last practice ends, whether the room holds a full class, one coach or no one. Sun pours through the high windows, and the fixtures beside them work just as hard. The school paid for efficient lights and still pays to light an empty gym.
Give the same gym smart lighting, and the fixtures dim between classes and switch off when it empties. The row by the windows eases back on bright afternoons. A game night gets full output; a study hall gets less. Nobody had to change a habit.
Why the economics have changed
When LED first went in, most of the savings were in the fixture. With LED in place, the largest remaining savings are in control. In a large field study by the DesignLights Consortium and the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, networked lighting controls cut lighting energy by nearly half, on average, on top of the savings from LED.
Two cautions belong beside that number. It is an average across many buildings, not a promise for yours, and it covers what the lights use, not the whole bill. Every building is different, which is why we measure.
The savings come from efficiency and control together: fixtures that use less power every hour they are on, and controls that decide when they run and how bright. And as the region uses more electricity, an hour of light nobody needed costs more to waste. The grid is starting to value buildings that can ease off at peak times.
Free Energy Assessment
What are your lights doing after everyone goes home?
We walk your buildings with you and put real numbers in writing: what lighting costs you today, what it could cost, and how the savings can pay for the work. No cost, no obligation.
Why “later” can cost more
The tempting plan is plain LED now and controls later. In practice, adding networked controls to fixtures already on the ceiling is often impractical or too expensive, so the savings can stay out of reach until the next replacement, years away. The DesignLights Consortium’s position is that any fixture being replaced should at least be controls-ready, if not controlled. We go one step further: when fixtures are coming down anyway, put the controls in now.
For a building still on fluorescent lighting, that is good news: it can get the new fixtures and the controls in one project instead of two.
Where we come in
Affinity is one company in Dover, New Hampshire that builds the lights and makes them intelligent. Best Built fixtures are the muscle, American-built by a dedicated US Veteran assembly team. CLIQ Connected is the brains: integral sensors and luminaire-level controls in every fixture, programmed on site for each space and built to grow into a connected, then managed, building. One team engineers, builds, installs and services every system. One partner. We stay in.
What this means for your buildings
If your buildings already have LED, you made the right first move, and the next one builds on it. What are your lights doing when nobody is there? A Free Energy Assessment answers that with real numbers in writing for each building, at no cost.
Next in this series: Part 2 goes inside a classroom, a gym and a hallway, and shows how to tell a true LLLC system from a sensor on a light.
Research Brief
Want to go deeper? Read the Research Brief.
Every fact in this article with its source, the full research behind it, and answers to the questions readers ask.
Sources: U.S. Department of Energy; DesignLights Consortium and Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance; ISO New England. Full citations are in the Research Brief.