One of the first projects I decided to tackle was the lighting. There were so many incandescent bulbs in the fixtures that I knew it would be low hanging fruit for lowering the electrical bill by replacing them with LED equivalents. The first task I set out to do was counting all the fixtures and their bulb types so I knew what replacements to order. My findings shocked me. The table below shows how many lights are in this building. I’ve broken it out between regular lightbulbs and tube lights because the project for replacing those are drastically different and I’ll talk about those separately.
First, a little education so you’ll understand the chart. As we all know, lightbulbs come in all shapes and sizes. I’ve always had generic terms that I used for them: Normal, candelabra and flood. Normal, obviously, being the kind that go in most fixtures that we use every day when we flip the switch. Pretty much the way Edison designed them. Candelabra meaning those with the smaller base that fit in special chandeliers. Finally, flood being those directed ones that are recessed in the ceiling or pointing suspiciously at everyone who comes to our porch. Due to the numerous different fixtures in this place I got learned on all those different shapes and base sizes of bulbs. Now I could have replaced fixtures but the return on that investment makes changing them a matter of aesthetics instead of money. So I bought different types of bulbs to fit the existing fixtures. What I considered a normal bulb has two names, one for the shape of the glass/plastic part and one for the base. The base of a “normal” bulb is E26 and the shape is A19. A candelabra is an E12 base usually and the shape is B8-13. If you are so enthralled and want to know more you can visit where I learned this from here: https://www.bulbs.com/learning/basechart.aspx. One last note about that base/size. There are some that are E26 base but a different size simply because the sconce won’t fit the larger bulbs.
Anyway, I don’t want to bore you too much with the shapes/sizes, on to the chart.
Regular bulbs (Base/Size)
As I was replacing the incandescent light bulbs my brilliant wife said, hey, we don’t have to put all the bulbs in there you know. Since the main point of this exercise was to reduce energy cost that was like an aha moment. Sixteen of those G9 bi-pin lights were for fixtures that already had 4 track lights. They were more decorative than useful and they are in our apartment anyway so that was a no brainer. So not all of these 255 lights will be replaced but on average the candelabra bulbs went from 40 down to 4 watts and the track lighting went from 50 down to 5 watts each. So on those that’s moving to 1/10th the energy usage. All but a couple of the E26 bulbs were already fluorescent curly-q light bulbs. Equivalent LED bulbs only save 1-2 watts from those so it only makes sense to replace those for two reasons: more lumens or when they break. Until it opens as a museum we don’t need more lumens so for now, those will stay fluorescent.
Speaking of fluorescents. Since converting fluorescent tube lights to LED was a much tougher job I naturally procrastinated it. I had a lot of learning to do since I knew I had to rewire. Fluorescent tube lights use a device called a ballast that is needed to control the current. Fluorescent lights that you just screw in to a normal socket have that built into them. LED tube lights don’t need a ballast which in turn saves more energy. A ballast pulls anywhere between 4 and 10 watts, even if the power is off! Rewiring, however, takes a lot of work. I had a lot of research to do before I was ready. I eventually found out that there are 3 main types of LED tubes. Ballast compatible, ballast bypass and ballast agnostic. Ballast compatible are the easiest. They don’t require any rewiring but that means the ballast is still in there so you don’t get the energy benefit. Ballast bypass means you have to rewire and the ballast agnostic work either way. Beyond that you can have single ended power and dual ended power which means the rewiring is different. After lots of research from reading and youtube videos I finally decided on single ended power because the wiring seemed much simpler to me. So I picked myself up by my bootstraps and got to work.
The very first task was mapping the breakers. You have to have the electricity off to rewire so we had to do that first. It wasn’t as simple as it sounds. This building has 7 breaker panels. 3 in the basement and two on each of the other floors. So with the kids we went to the top floor and I had them stand in different rooms and tell me when the lights went off as I flipped each switch. With that done, the next morning I did my first fixture. It took 3 hours but I learned a lot doing it. The 2nd one I did that day only took 45 minutes. The next 3 that I did the following weekend only took about 30 minutes each or so. Now on to the numbers.
Fluorescent tubes
So yes, there are 210 fluorescent tube lights of varying size in this building. The fixtures have between one and four bulbs each. With that comes all the hazardous materials like mercury, times 210. And that’s not counting the ballasts. If they are as old as I think (manufacturing date stamp looks like 1959 to me) that means there are all sorts of hazardous chemicals in these fixtures.
In trying to keep up with one of the purposes in buying this building, I taught my oldest two, Michael (15) and Vivian (13) how to remove the ballasts and wire the fixtures. I offered them $20 per fixture and with around 85-90 fixtures remaining that’ll set me back a cool $1,800 or so but I figure the dividends from them learning to do a hard blue collar type job will be more than worth it. They are already planning on what they will buy with all that money. Number one on their lists? Pets.