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."