Saving Energy Increasingly Becoming More Important for U.S. Families

In a recently published study by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research entitled ENERGY EFFICIENCY AND INDEPENDENCE: HOW THE PUBLIC UNDERSTANDS, LEARNS AND ACTS, has indicated that American families rank energy issues very highly after the economy, education, and health care.

As reported by Dina Cappiello of The Associated Press, she writes that

as summer beckons, it seems Americans are thinking more about the stifling cost of energy than about making tracks to the beach.

In the bar graph above, you can see that saving money on energy costs is the second-highest ranked priority by the respondents to this survey. At Outdoor Lighting Perspectives (OLP) of Colorado, we have seen a very strong demand by both new and existing customers for the latest LED lighting fixtures. In almost every case, the homeowners expressed a strong desire to decrease their energy usage.

In the U.S., previous studies have determined that residential lighting accounts for as much as 15-percent of a household’s total energy budget. Until recently, almost half of this energy usage dedicated to lighting had been wasted due to the use of inefficient bulbs (incandescent), the use of higher wattage bulbs than needed for effective illumination, and the fact that lighting systems were not automatically controlled.

The low voltage LED lighting systems (new and retrofit) that OLP of Colorado has been installing will provide a homeowner an energy savings of as much as 82-percent over the previous quartz halogen system. Later this week our crews will be retrofitting an existing customer’s lighting system to LED, and I will report our progress in a future blog post.

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