Power Play

Lighting showrooms turn to controls and other energy - saving devices to manage intake and increase sales.
Lighting showrooms sure can put on a show. Hundreds - maybe even thousands - of lamps and fixtures lit up on the sales floor give customers the opportunity to look, feel, evaluate and compare each product to the next. Its a benefit that brick - and mortar retailers have over their online competitors. But that advantage can come with a hefty price tag.
"Customers want to see what the lights look like when theyre turned on," says Kyle Kamakura, Vice President of Dial Lighting Gallery in Honolulu. "Thats why they come to a lighting showroom. But it takes a whole lot of power to keep the lights running and to make sure the showroom stays a comfortable temperature. It adds up fast."
Like many lighting showrooms, Dial relies on controls to help keep its energy consumption and its air conditioning costs in check. Optiwatt, one of the most widely used systems, gets that job done by limiting the number of fixtures that can be illuminated at any given time. It also helps showrooms cut down on maintenance time and costs.
"We used to have everything on its own pull or switch, and sometimes when we were busy and not able to monitor it closely, people would end up turning all the lights on, and the circuits would trip, and wed have to scramble to fix them," Kamakura says. "Now, we rarely trip a breaker."
Design Lighting in Surrey, BC, also made the switch from manual switching to the Optiwatt system when it opened its new location in 2009.
"Manual switching prevented us from having all of our lights plugged in at the same time," says Design Lighting President Bill deHaas. "It was just too much wattage, too much light and too much heat. Now, only one - twelfth of the fixtures are operational at a time, and that really minimizes our showrooms energy consumption."
The benefits of such systems dont end there. Products like Optiwatt also tout their ability to increase sales. Indeed, controlling the number of fixtures on at any given time may help easily overwhelmed customers make sense out of a sea of lights.