Survey: Do You Turn Out the Lights?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.23.08


The British Carbon Trust says that companies should go after the low hanging fruit; just turning off the lights in empty rooms when you finish your TPS reports can save as much as 15% of lighting costs.
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My workplace is set up with a kind of motion sensor that turns lights on when you come into the room or hallway and goes off after a short period of time with the option to turn the light off manually.
I'm sitting in my office right now with the lights off! There is (barely) enough natural coming through the window and from the hallway.
My solar-calculator has some trouble, but I'm happier without that buzz of the flourescents anyway.
We (luckily in the winter and not so luckily in the summer) have several floor-ceiling southern facing windows. In the summer our lights are on only in the rooms we're using at the end of the day. In the winter it's more, but the blinds are always open to let in the light and the warmth.
The office I work in has motion sensor lights, so there are no switches in the main areas.
The building is also designed so that everyone has natural light, thus meaning that less lighting is required during the day.
The only drawback to this system is if you are the only one working late - the lights keep going out, and the choice is either to just work by the light from your computer screen, or get up and jump about a bit every 5 mins or so to turn the lights back on
We have natural light in most places in our office. We don't turn them on so we don't have to turn them off.
Everything in the office except the fax machine goes off at night (and I'm lobbying to get that turned off). The only things we have running are the red LED for the Tri-Metric battery monitor and the 2 green LED lights on the desulfator for the battery system (off-grid office)
I am not allowed,but i do at the computer lamp at work. I hate when it is left on. I use to turn off the t.v. at work, then i got yelled at.
Our lights are motion sensor. The only thing we turn on/off is the tv and computers.
Our lights turn off when there is no activity in the office