Eureka Floor Carpet One sells floor coverings and performs installments to homes and commercial businesses across Humboldt County. Carpet One experiences customer visits sporadically throughout the day, sometimes several hours or just a few minutes apart, so lights must remain on constantly during business hours. Though Carpet One receives fewer customers than other retail businesses, customers spend more money fulfilling larger jobs.
Retrofits
Eureka Floor Carpet One's main purpose for performing the retrofits was because of the cost benefit-analysis from a small business stand point. Carpet One was looking for a more energy efficient lighting system and a means to replace their older, ballast lighting system which had been less cost-effective. When ballast lighting systems get older, they smoke and must be changed one at a time because of their often unpredictable shelf life. Carpet One was having to pay an electrician to change the ballast each time an individual light went out and sought to change this problem by using RCEA's Energy Watch rebate to replace all existing ballast lights with long-lasting compact fluorescent tube lighting.
Retrofit Analysis
- Replaced Existing lighting with Compact Fluorescent Lighting
- Installed April 2007
- Total Installed Cost: $6,149.99
- Instant Rebate: $2,857.77
- Final Cost: $3,292.22
- Estimated Simple Payback: 1.5 Years
Change in Habits
Eureka Floor Carpet One Reported using their lights more often than when they first installed the compact florescent lights. We suspect this change in energy use occurred during the month of April, 2008. According to our graph of Carpet One Energy Consumption this increase in energy use continued for almost an entire year, finally decreasing in April of 2009.
Future Upgrades
Eureka Floor Carpet One has no more lighting available for upgrade, but has expressed interest in both solar electric and solar heating retrofits.
Customer Satisfaction
Eureka Floor Carpet One expressed satisfaction with their overall experience with the RCEA staff and contractors. One aspect of the upgrade which Carpet One would have liked to been more informed that there was more than one electrician working on the retrofits. Carpet One also believed that analysis took longer to complete than the expected amount of time.