NY SUPERMARKET REDUCES COSTS BY 50% WITH EPA/MEMO-COGEN LIGHTING UPGRADE

EPA/MEMO-Cogen, Inc. has completely upgraded the interior and exterior lighting of Silver Barn Farms. Silver Barn is a community-oriented, self-service supermarket, located in Middle Village, Queens, NY. The store is a free-standing structure with an attached tent-like enclosure for selling fruits and vegetables, an indoor retail selling area, and a basement level for storage, along with large, walk-in refrigeration units. The project involved retrofitting the existing F96T12 fluorescent fixtures with new T8 electronic ballasts and lamps.

In the 1980s, the owner had participated in an energy conservation project in which Con Edison exchanged 75 watt T12 lamps for watt-miser lamps with reflectors. That project had the unintended effect of reducing light levels because the program required the removal of two lamps from a four-lamp fixture. This new program, however, proved to be much more effective because the end result is the upgrading of the existing fixtures to produce more and better quality lighting.

Silver Barn's new lighting system incorporates 3500K lamps in the produce area and 4100K lamps for the retail area. In order to increase brightness, existing reflectors were cleaned to improve downlighting.

The net result, as with all of EPA/MEMO-Cogen's lighting retrofit projects, provided a payback of less than 2 years and a 40% return on investment.