The Ultimate Lighting Upgrade: Our Own

Here at Phoenix, we’re proud to be recognized as a world leader in the heavy duty lighting industry. But up until recently, our own shop lights gave a different impression.

“Visitors would come in and give us the business. ‘You’re a lighting company, where’s all the light?’” joked Jeff Konkel, VP of Operations.

Our warehouse was long overdue for an upgrade. As a Focus on Energy® Trade Ally contractor, we knew it was time to take a step in the right direction.

“It was about finding the right light for the building,” said our Maintenance Manager, Mark Chirillo. “We hung a series of other lights, but they didn’t seem to do what we wanted them to do. So, when we released the Ascend series, we knew it was the right fit for us.”

Now, all 139 of our high bay fixtures are own energy-efficient, high output Ascend LED fixtures.

“The maintenance workers, the machinists and the fabrication team really seem to be happy with it. And for me, having the extra brightness in the engineering lab has helped out a lot, too.” said Jordan Dahl, our Product and Applications Engineer.

But the results of upgrading our lights go far beyond better lighting across the building. Making the switch to LEDs resulted in a nearly $7,000 financial incentive from the Focus on Energy’s Business Incentives Program. Jeff calls this a triple win.

“First off, we had in-house skilled labor to do the lighting layouts and replace the lights,” he said. “The second one, we had a very good cost for buying a light that we’re already selling. And the third win is our electric bill going forward.”

We estimate that our Ascend lights will save us about 2,977,380 kilowatt hours of electricity over the course of their lifetime. That’s enough energy to power 252 homes for an entire year.