Convert to this Lighting Sooner Than Later to Save Money, Improve Customer and Employee Experience
By Mark Werning, COO, American Bank & Trust
Should you convert to LED lights? American Bank & Trust is a Davenport Iowa-based bank with seven branches and about $350 million in assets. Several years ago, we started taking a close look at our green initiatives and implemented a lot of changes to align ourselves with our social responsibility.
One of our initiatives was making changes to our deposit accounts by launching our Green Account. The objective of the Green Account is to move our customers over to electronic statements. Another initiative was to talk to our customers about signing up for Bill Pay. We believe that we can reduce negative impact on our environment by avoiding using paper wherever we can. It came naturally for us to look at our own practices and focus on green initiatives internally.
At the time, we did not have plans to convert to LED lighting. In hindsight, it was the perfect pathway from our Green Accounts we want our customers to utilize, and for us, to also reduce our impact on the environment by converting to LED.
We were first introduced to Yellowblue LED through one of our employees.
The cost savings and rebates got our attention immediately.
We looked at several bids for the project, some of those bids came from lighting companies that are also our customers.
What made the biggest impression on us as a bank was that Yellowblue LED presented a six-page analysis to us that outlined the project cost, our cost savings and also the return on the investment for the project.
John and David at Yellowblue LED also talked to us about the rebates we were eligible for through MidAmerican Energy. Between the cost savings and the rebates that were still available at the time, our return on investment was within two years, and as with any sound investment, we came to realize how timely this project was for us to implement right away.
There is a saying that says, “you don’t know, what you don’t know,” and we learned a lot about lights.
Some of our lights used 400W bulbs, and we could reduce that wattage by as much as 70% and have better light quality. We definitely had moments where we were asking ourselves why we even had these lights to begin with.
Yellowblue LED’s bid was competitive, their lighting specialists were very professional, and the references and reviews were very positive.
One of the references that resonated with us was a baseball card collector company. They said with the old fluorescent bulbs, their cards were weathering and losing value. With the LED lighting, they said that their cards didn’t weather anymore, and they are keeping the value of the cards.
The Yellowblue LED team made the installation process painless for us, and they were very responsive to communication and keeping us updated from the start until project completion.
The rebate process with MidAmerican Energy was a great experience as well. We simply submitted the forms and received our rebate within weeks.
Reflecting on the whole process, Yellowblue LED absolutely exceeded our expectations.
- Aesthetically, LED lighting transformed our buildings. Our new exterior logo signs are complemented by the light quality of the LED in the interior. Our buildings are brighter, and overall, have a fresh feel when our customers enter the bank.
- Our old fluorescent fixtures had grids that were cracking and hard to replace, the clean lines of the LED troffers offer our facilities a cutting-edge appearance.
- Another positive result of LED lighting conversion is that we had a number of employees that used to suffer from headaches when we had the fluorescent lights. Since our conversion, those employees no longer suffer from headaches while they are at work.
For us at American Bank & Trust, our LED lighting conversion was a great experience because of Yellowblue LED, and we would hands down tell any business owner that the time to convert to LED is sooner rather than later.
