How to design great lighting in a hotel or a restaurant while reducing energy consumption?

As a hotel owner, you understand the importance of saving where you can, without reducing the comfort you offer your guests. With rising energy costs across Europe and more and more potential guests looking for sustainable options, reducing your energy use makes sense. And your use of lighting is a great starting point.

Typically, lighting accounts for 15 – 45 percent of electricity consumption in small hotels and restaurants. In regions where there are no large heating or cooling costs, it can be the greatest use of electricity in a hotel.

Most lighting energy is used in the 24-hour communal areas of a hotel – the corridors and lobby. In a typical 65-room hotel using traditional lighting, this can add up to almost 1000 kWh per day in corridors and 370 kWh per day in the lobby. Bedrooms come next, using about 350 kWh per day.

If you are thinking about cutting your lighting costs, you may first consider replacing your light bulbs with expensive new energy-saving ones. While new technologies of lamps can drastically cut your costs in the long run, it's also important to consider a broader strategy for lighting your premises. What do you use light for? How is your light managed?

Could you improve your guests' comfort, your staff's safety and your energy bill all at once?

Make a plan

When you are reviewing your lighting needs throughout your hotel, the best way to start is to make a plan. An optimised lighting system incorporates natural light, colour schemes, lighting intelligence and guest comfort.

Your guests and staff have different needs in different areas of your hotel. The best lighting systems will accommodate those needs in the most efficient way. For instance, in guest areas, lighting needs can be broken down as:

• Ambient lighting – daily indoor activity areas and outdoor safety and security.
• Task lighting – bedside lamps, kitchenettes lighting, bathroom mirror lamps, desk lamps.
• Accent lighting – indoor or outdoor areas, drawing attention for aesthetic purposes.

Once you have assessed the needs of your guests in each zone, you are ready to start examining the components of an optimised lighting system that will address those needs.

Daylighting is the use of natural light through windows or skylights. North-facing windows provide an even, natural light with little glare. South-facing windows may be useful in cooler climates, but will likely allow too much heat elsewhere. East and west-facing windows cause glare and may admit too much heat in summer if not properly insulated.

If you are looking at daylighting options, it is worth checking the effect on your heating and cooling costs. In some cases, the additional costs of heating or cooling to offset the impact of your daylighting option can outweigh the benefits gained from reduced lighting costs.

Optimal colour schemes for your walls and furnishings can make a significant difference to the amount of lighting required. Using light materials and matte finishes will maximise the benefit of natural light in day-lit areas, while light walls and finishes with a high surface reflectance will maximise the effectiveness of your lighting system.

Installing light management control systems can be a large energy saver in areas with intermittent use. Some options include timers and sensors for corridor and other areas with intermittent traffic, and key-card controllers which cut power to guest rooms when they are not occupied. But be careful that the light bulbs you install match the specific light management, since some technologies have reduced lifetime if switched on and off too many times. For areas with highly intermittent lighting, such as corridors with motion sensors, LED lamps provide the most cost-effective light over the life of the lamps.

Intelligent lighting systems in corridors can reduce the corridor lighting demand by around 70 percent compared to 24-hour operation.

Replacing conventional lamps with newer technology will help you save money. Traditional lighting is typically dominated by incandescent lamps, which are being phased out completely throughout Europe. There are a number of replacement options, depending on your needs, which are all more energy efficient than incandescent lamps.

The most efficient are:

• Gas discharge lamps. These include fluorescent tubes and compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). They are energy efficient and have a long lamp life, but take time to warm up, are difficult to dim and contain mercury.
• Light emitting diodes (LED). LEDs have a great number of benefits – they are energy efficient, emit low heat radiation, have a very long lamp life, are dimmable, start instantly and can provide directional light. They are however more expensive, and sometimes not considered best for ambient lighting.

When selecting the new light bulbs, you can maximise savings by carefully matching the lighting output of the new light bulbs to the actual needs for the specific application according to your lighting strategy. For instance, when replacing a 60W incandescent light bulb (emitting 800 lumens) in a lamp in the corner of your guest rooms, you do not necessarily need a 10W LED lamp emitting the same 800 lumens, but a cheaper and less energy consuming light bulb may be enough, such as an 8W LED lamp emitting 650 lumens or a 5W LED lamp emitting 400 lumens.

By replacing the incandescent and halogen lamps with LED, CFL and E27 halogen lamps, the 293-room Prague Marriott Hotel saved around 58 percent on lighting electricity. In real savings, this was valued at up to €40,000 per year! While your hotel may be substantially smaller, the percentage of lighting electricity to be saved may be similar.

The final part of your plan should be to implement a regular maintenance program for your lighting systems. This program should include regular lamp cleaning and sensor testing.

You will find a number of benefits from redesigning or improving the lighting systems in your hotel. 

This will:

• Reduce your energy consumption and costs
• Reduce your maintenance costs, with longer lamp lifetimes
• Improve the wellbeing and comfort of your guests and staff with greater lighting quality
• Improve the environmental credentials of your hotel.

With longer lamp lifetimes, daylighting and intelligent lighting systems, you will be saving on energy costs and reducing the size of your ecological footprint with no disruption to the quality of your guests’ experience.