Digital Lumens today announced that Ace Hardware Corporation, the world’s largest hardware cooperative, has upgraded the lighting in areas of its 1,000,000 square foot Rocklin, Calif., Retail Support Center to the Digital Lumens Intelligent LED Lighting System. Since implementing the upgrade in October 2013, Ace Hardware saved an average of 81 percent  on its lighting-related energy use.

“As a member-owned cooperative, every dollar we save using the Digital Lumens system directly benefits our member stores,” said Reid Barney, Facilities & Loss Prevention Manager for Ace Hardware. “And since lighting is our single biggest energy warehousing expense, reducing lighting-related energy usage by an average of 81 percent  since installing the system translates into extraordinary bottom-line savings. With higher quality light, we’ve more than doubled the foot candle readings within our facility, resulting in enhanced productivity and employee satisfaction – all while saving massive amounts of energy.”

By replacing the facility’s 1,653 fixtures (1,551 T5 fluorescent and 102 metal halide), Ace Hardware has reduced its power usage per square foot by 39.56 percent , while improving light quality and illumination levels throughout the facility.

The Digital Lumens deployment was preceded by an eight-month, in-depth research project by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to quantify the effect increasing levels of control have on energy efficiency. Conducted by PG&E partner TRC Solutions, the study isolated the variables that contribute to energy efficiency – dimming, occupancy and daylight harvesting – and evaluated them, both individually and collectively, in a real-world scenario at Ace's Rocklin facility, documenting the extraordinary energy savings that highly integrated and controllable lighting systems can deliver to industrial facilities.

The PG&E study found that compared to basic LEDs, systems with “aggressive advanced controls,” like the Digital Lumens system, delivered 43 percent more energy savings, and a reduction of 93 percent  over the previously installed metal halide fixtures. PG&E chose the Digital Lumens system for its research project because it was the only system on the market today that could both isolate, as well as aggregate, all the variables necessary to conduct its battery of tests.