potrero view

December 2008

Energy Efficient Products: Hype or Headache?

By Lori Higa

With money tight and higher prices for food, transportation and utilities, consumers are increasingly turning to energy efficient products with the hope of slashing their bills. But in the midst of this green revolution, some items aren’t performing as well as expected.

First developed in the late 1920s, fluorescent lights put out the same amount of light as incandescent bulbs using up to 70 percent less electricity. But, according to Marlon Segal, Foster City-based Peninsula Jewish Community Center’s (JCC) property manager, energy efficient light bulbs can turn into a money pit. The JCC is “…a large campus with thousands of lights,” Segal said. “In the old days, when an incandescent bulb burned out, you changed it yourself. Now, with all this energy-efficient lighting, you need an electrician. He has to come out and take a look to find what’s broken. They never have the part, of course, so he has to special order it and that turns into several trips. At our location, the lighting is high off the ground. You need a lift to get at the light…in the old days, you did it yourself with ladder and a pole that had a suction cup. Now it costs $500 to replace a light fixture. Electricians charge $125 an hour; two, three hours of work at $125 an hour to fix one ballast. I don’t argue there are savings to be had, but repair costs are astronomical.”

Many Bay Area businesses have replaced their fluorescent T-12s with T-8s – lamp diameters are measured in eighths of an inch; a T-8 is an inch wide – that are up to 20 percent more efficient and provide better lighting with less flicker, truer color and longer life.  Women-owned organic produce vendor Veritable Vegetable replaced all of its lighting about a year ago with the assistance of San Francisco Community Power (SF Power), a Dogpatch-based nonprofit which helps small businesses and low-income families reduce their utility bills. According to facilities manager Renée Feliciano, “In our warehouse, we used to have a contiguous line of 17 T-12s hanging overhead, with each fixture holding four lamps. Today the ceiling now has only four fixtures, each with two T-8s. The new configuration gives out a lot more light with a smaller number of lamps and costs a lot less.  And the quality of the lights is much better. When you turned on the old lights, they were dim at first, then they would flicker and you’d have to wait for them to warm up. The new lights come on right away, there’s no flicker and they’re brighter. We get a fuller color spectrum and higher Kelvin, so we don’t need as many fixtures.” The savings are dramatic: about $1,200 less per month.

George Nusrah, manager of Geary Wholesale, a Bayview-based food distributor, has had mixed experiences with lighting and refrigeration upgrades.  Working with SF Power and EnergyWatch, a partnership between the San Francisco Department of the Environment (SF Environment) and Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Nusrah oversaw retrofits of the wholesaler’s gigantic, 52-door refrigerator – replacing all the rubber seals and installing a computerized temperature controller to save energy – and fluorescent lighting in its 18,000 square foot warehouse.  “The updated refrigerator works great,” Nusrah said.   However, when it came to replacing the 180 T-12 lamps and 150 fixtures with T-4s, things didn’t turn out so well.  According to Nusrah, half of the new lights blew out after only a few months.  “They were supposed to last three to five years,” Nusrah said.  “We figured out it was the ballasts that failed, not the tubes, but we don’t know if it was because they were cheap, defective or shoddy workmanship.”  Nusrah contacted the Los Angeles-based vendor, SunPark Electronics Corporation, who said they would replace the fixtures for free.  But Nusrah’s electrician said it would cost $2,000 to take out the 18 fixtures, an expense the wholesaler couldn’t afford.  

Despite the headaches, Nusrah admits that the new lighting is a big improvement, providing better quality and greater illumination at less cost.  “Lighting is really important, we need it to show products in the aisles for our cash and carry customers.”  And the efficiency upgrades have cut the company’s electricity bill in half, from roughly $10,000 to $4,500  a month, according to Nusrah, who is looking forward to working with EnergyWatch on the next efficiency project:  installing light-emitting diodes (LED) in the refrigerator.  

“We used to have T-12s with the old style ballasts, which was a coil wire filled with tar that would last 15, 20 years,” said Segal. “We replaced them with T-8s. Ask any electrician, these new ballasts don’t hold up. I have no scientific proof, but there seems to be more failures and I think it’s the manufacturers’ fault. A lot of them are jumping on the green bandwagon and there’s no vetting.”

According to a 2004 memorandum from environmental advocacy nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “At some point in the future the ballast provided with the fixture will eventually fail. Currently it is very difficult to remove the ballast and even when the ballast can be removed, it is virtually impossible for a consumer to find the replacement ballast at a hardware store. When a ballast fails, the consumer will likely first try to replace the lamp. Once that doesn’t work they are faced with the choices of a) throwing out the lamp and having it replaced, or b) calling in an electrician. The electrician will then replace the ballast if s/he can easily remove it and find the replacement, or recommend removing the current fixture and replacing it with a new one. These scenarios are not very appealing…consumers will opt to throw out the fixture, an undesirable outcome from an environmental point of view, then call in an electrician, which can easily cost $100 each time a ballast fails. This is extremely expensive for a product that might have cost $50 or less, and is very inconvenient, especially for new energy-efficient homes which could conceivably have 20 or more hard-wired pin-based fixtures inside.”

“The only time a CFL or electronic ballast fails is generally due to user error,” countered Aaron Brown, program manager with Santa Cruz-based environmental nonprofit EcologyAction (EcoAction). Richard Young, a senior engineer with Food Service Technology Center (FSTC), agreed. “When it comes to a CFL, buying one with an Energy Star rating is the only way to go,” said Young. Energy Star, a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy, USEPA and manufacturers, rates products’ energy efficiency. “CFLs are made to last a long time, longer than their rated life. But if you stick a CFL into a dimmer or three-way system that will destroy the bulb…It’s electronic, like a computer, and is only rated for its specific voltage. If you run it out of spec. that will kill it.”

“A typical CFL is not encased, so it cools fast,” Brown said. “It has a decent lifespan of 8,000 to 10,000 hours. If you take another type of CFL, one that’s encased in glass, has a reflector and the look people want, it will have a shorter lifespan – 6,000 to 8,000 hours – because encased, it doesn’t cool as well. If you put the CFL into an encased floodlight fixture, then you have double casing, some are vented, some not. The unvented track light fixtures will kill the bulb…and cut by half its life, down to 3,000 hours.”

Feliciano recalled such an instance of CFL failure. “We had lights in recessed fixtures that kept burning out. The fixtures used screw-in mini ballasts which let the CFLs get too hot. The lamp could handle the heat, but the ballast could not. To release the heat, we drilled small holes in the back of the fixture. That seemed to do the trick.”

“When ballasts are not dosed with enough mercury, they can also fail prematurely,” said energy specialist John Holden of EcoAction. “For example, if GE doses a lamp with lots of mercury, it generally lasts, but when they go for the littlest amount of mercury possible, it can go out in a few weeks.”

The only time Keith Gentner, co-owner of Potrero Hill’s Center Hardware, has seen a CFL failure is when a manufacturer delivered a palette of fluorescent fixtures with the wrong ballasts. “We sold a light, the customer found it didn’t work, brought it back. We took it apart and discovered the manufacturer had put the wrong ballast in the fixture,” he recalled. “Fortunately, they were so inexpensive, the manufacturer didn’t want it back, said to just toss ‘em.”

“We’re not gonna talk about those 99 cent bulbs you can buy at the dollar store, ‘cause they’re garbage,” Brown insisted. “They don’t last and give the industry a bad name. Everyone wants to produce and sell CFLs, because they see they can make money and don’t care about quality. There’s definitely people making bad ones.” Many cheap CFLs come from Asia. But even the more trusted American brand names, such as GE and Sylvania, manufacture offshore. “If a consumer gets a CFL and it fails, I tell them to buy another one, and make sure it’s from a trusted brand such as GE, Sylvania, Phillips, Maxlite,” said Brown.

EcoAction vets all the products it installs, and makes sure that they have warranties. “An unknown brand is a big question,” Brown said. “You don’t know how the product will perform, and there’s no recourse, as with a known manufacturer. Sure, there’s an occasional bad product, but then they recall. The point is that they do recall. The no-name, no warranty, no local rep fly-by-nights will take your money and never look back.”

Gentner thinks it’s difficult to tell if new efficient lighting will live up to the hype. “They’ve only been around for 10 years. Old magnetic ballasts that are 40 to 50 years old are still in use.” A Potrero Hill institution since the late-19th century, Center Hardware offers a cornucopia of green lighting, from bulbs to ballasts, at prices ranging from 50 cents for a bulb to $45 for a new ballast. Manufacturers run the gamut from the well-known to the obscure. “When the rebates stop, people are going to suffer sticker shock. The price of CFLs will go up to $5 to $7 a piece and that’ll make people think twice about getting them, especially since they can buy four incandescent bulbs for $2,” Gentner said.

“There’s an array of products ranging from the ridiculous to sublime,” quipped Jim Tabor, Center Hardware’s buyer. “Yes, some are more efficient, more ergonomic and well-constructed than 20 years ago. Appliances haven’t gotten inherently better, but computer-aided design and technology have. It’s codes that drive product improvements, not consumer demand. If you want crappy product, there’s plenty to choose from.”

CFLs contain mercury -- roughly equivalent to what’s on the tip of a ball-point pen – which needs to be kept out of landfills. When a lamp breaks, mercury and lead can be released, contaminating air, water or groundwater. The State of California has issued fish consumption warnings due to high mercury levels found in the San Francisco Bay. It’s likely that some of these toxins are due to improper disposal of lamps containing mercury.

Older T-12 ballasts contain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which can cause cancer and reproductive/developmental problems. A half-century ago PCBs were used as coolants, sealants and insulators in everything from carbonless copy paper to flame retardants and electrical wiring. They were banned in the 1970s, and are now classified as persistent organic pollutants which bio-accumulate in animals. While new ballasts are PCB-free, all fluorescents must be recycled; spent fluorescents are considered hazardous waste. Center Hardware relies on a special service to dispose of its old fluorescents. “It costs us twice as much to get rid of old lighting than to install new lighting!” said Gentner.

According to EcoAction’s Brown, a “CFL which reduces energy use by 75 percent still uses less mercury than is released into the environment with an incandescent. Incandescents burn more mercury through fuel emissions needed to produce it, whether you’re using coal or nuclear to produce electricity. Old T-12s have eight to 10 milligrams of mercury. New T-8s have less than four milligrams. It’s made a huge difference,” said Brown.

Lighting isn’t the only device that’s become more efficient. “If Al Gore was president, everyone would have a front loading washer by this time…it’s a true green machine,” said the mustachioed Will Cherin, of the Valencia Street appliance store, which was founded in 1892. “These washers spin at 1,100 revolutions per minute (rpms), while top loaders only spin at 425 rpms. That’s why your laundry comes out wet from top loading machines. You cut your dry time cut in half with new front loading machines,” said Cherin. Top loading washing machines use 53 gallons of water, while front loaders use only 17 gallons. “And they clean your wash better while using less energy and heating less water,” Cherin pointed out. He claimed the shop has never had a return on a front-loading washer.

“Many food businesses, like restaurants, don’t have much money, especially if they’re a startup,” said FTSC’s Young. “Typically small business owners will buy the lowest cost equipment. For example, a fryer. It’s a real energy guzzler and not well built. They’ll buy the cheapest one they can find. The burners in the fryer break. A steel fry pot with welding will start to crack. It’s like a Yugo. An energy-efficient fryer costs two to three times more and typically lasts many more years. That’s like going from a Yugo to a Honda,” Young stated.

Kristina Feldman, who leads SF Power’s climate change program, observed, “When we go out on audits, it’s often a small business with an old refrigerator. Some of them take over 10 years to retire and they’re a huge energy sucker, built to last a half century.” While incentives and rebates spur sales to would-be green consumers, savings are sometimes cancelled out by product failure. “For example,” declared Feldman, “PG&E suggest a CFL that’s touted as highly efficient. But we’ve seen how bulbs burn out fast. So you’re saving energy, but wasting dollars in adding hazardous, solid waste into landfill.”

“Generally you will pay a premium for higher efficiency equipment and quicker replacement of materials. State programs can sometimes make up the difference,” said Alena Gilchrist, who markets energy efficiency programs for SF Environment. EcoAction’s Holden recently attended an international lighting fair in Las Vegas, a town that’s the poster child for reckless disregard of energy resources, with its air-conditioned, garishly-lit 24-hour casinos of fake waterfalls and fountains in an arid desert clime. “I saw a lot of junk there, products of bad quality. I also saw a tremendous number of new products. LEDs are coming on line. They now match the quality of CFLs. The next big thing will be LED lamps.”

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