June marks the first full month of operation for our latest office environment experiment: can you improve the workspace by changing the color temperature of your office lighting?
The answer is unequivocally, YES.
Last month, Matt and I made the decision to remove all of our T8 overhead lighting fixtures in our office. The tubes were consuming 30 watts of power each and we had four fixtures of two tubes each in our suite for a total of eight 30 watt T8 tubes. This amounted to 240 watts of total power consumption in overhead lighting alone in roughly 300 square feet or 0.8 watts per square foot. While this is a low power draw for office lighting, we were convinced we could do better.
We started looking for LED task lights in a desktop format. Our search went on for days and we found no viable solutions. Finally, Matt and I decided to install R40 recessed can lights over our desks (two each) and MR-16 LED Track Lights over our meeting area. All of this new lighting would be of the 6500 kelvin color temperature, also known as "Daylight" or "cool blue." This color temperature most closely resembles the color temperature of actual sunlight. Another familiar source of this color of light is the Xenon gas arc that is emitted from many luxury cars on the road today. This color of light is ideal for a work environment as it is easier on your eyes when doing detail work such as reading, writing or typing.
The install took about four hours and cost us a little under $500. However, when you walk into our office, it now feels like the entire office is awash in daylight. With the T8 overhead tubes, I was getting frequent and unexplainable headaches from the gas discharge variance coming from the T8 tubes (this is when the gas in the tube produces uneven light and there is a subtle flicker in the light tube - no gas is actually leaking, its just annoying and inferior light). With the switch to R40 CFLs (task lighting) and MR-16 LEDs (meeting space, white board, artwork) in 6500 kelvin, those headaches are a thing of the past. We also added a 23 watt CFL lamp to even out the lighting in a newly created dark spot.
Reading is dramatically easier and eye strain is almost non-existent (save for the computer monitors, but that's a different post altogether).
As an added bonus, we now use 123 watts of total power to illuminate our suite or 0.42 watts per square foot with vastly superior results and dramatically less heat for the building to cool down from the T8 overheads. This amounts to a dramatic improvement in performance for both task execution and energy consumption (on both the illumination side and the HVAC side).
For more on what Old Town Plaza has done to reduce power consumption and improve building performance, check out Old Town Plaza's website at www.LeaseOldTown.com.
