The one where we talk you out of things
Energy savings, honestly
There is no box you can plug into a wall that will lower your electricity bill. There is real money in changing what your lighting draws, and it is arithmetic rather than a percentage on a leaflet.
There is no box that makes electricity cheaper. We do not sell energy-saving boxes, power-factor correction units, or anything else that plugs into an outlet and promises to cut your bill. A home meter bills real power in kilowatt-hours, and no device plugged into a receptacle changes how much of that your refrigerator, your dryer or your air conditioner uses. Lighting retrofits do save money, and the saving is arithmetic we will do in front of you with your own fixture count and your own rate — not a percentage off a marketing sheet. If the arithmetic does not pay back, we will say so, and you should not do the job.
Why the plug-in box cannot work
These devices are sold with claims of twenty to sixty per cent off a household bill, usually on the basis of “power factor correction” or “cleaning” the electricity. Power factor is a real thing: in an alternating-current circuit, some current can flow without doing useful work, and large industrial customers are sometimes billed in a way that accounts for it.
A residential customer is not. A domestic meter measures real power — kilowatt-hours — and that is what appears on the bill. Correcting power factor at one outlet does not reduce the real power your appliances consume, and it would not change your bill even if it did what the packaging claims. The Federal Trade Commission has been dealing with devices making this class of claim since the 1970s.
There is also a simple physical point that survives all the marketing: a small box plugged into one receptacle in your hallway has no mechanism by which to make a compressor, a heating element or a motor elsewhere in the house use less energy. Nothing connects them but the wiring, and the wiring is not where the consumption is.
Where the money actually is
In most Queens homes, the large consumers are heating and cooling, hot water, the refrigerator, and the dryer. Lighting is real but smaller — and it is the one an electrician can genuinely change.
The reason to be honest about that ordering is that it determines whether a job is worth doing. Somebody with a hundred halogen fittings running all evening has a lighting problem worth solving. A house that already has LED lamps in most fittings does not, and the money is better spent on insulation, controls, or a heating system that is not fighting the building.
The arithmetic, done in front of you
Count the fittings. Note the wattage now and the wattage after. Estimate hours of use honestly — a hallway light is not on for twelve hours a day and pretending it is inflates every number that follows. Multiply out to kilowatt-hours a year, and multiply that by the rate on your own bill rather than a national average.
That gives you an annual saving. Divide the job cost by it and you have a payback period in years. Now you can decide, and you can check every step of it yourself. What you will not get from us is a percentage, because a percentage is a way of making a number sound large without saying what it is a percentage of.
Things we will tell you not to do
Replacing LED fittings that already work, in pursuit of a marginal efficiency gain. Rewiring for efficiency — a rewire is about safety and capacity, and it will not change your bill. Fitting controls to rooms nobody forgets to switch off. And buying any device that promises a percentage off your bill, from us or from anybody.
A worked example
What a real retrofit looks like on paper
A two-family in Woodside with 24 halogen downlights across two kitchens and two hallways, at 50 watts each, used about four hours a day. That is 1,200 watts for four hours — roughly 1,750 kilowatt-hours a year.
Replacing them with 6 watt LED fittings takes the same usage to about 210 kilowatt-hours a year. At a rate of 24 cents per kilowatt-hour that is a saving of around $370 a year, against an installed cost in the region of $5,000 for 24 fittings. Payback is somewhere around thirteen years, which is longer than the fittings' expected life.
So on energy alone, that job does not justify itself — and we would say so. What might justify it is the halogen fittings running hot in an insulated ceiling, or the fact that the room is badly lit and you want it redesigned anyway. Those are good reasons. They are simply not the reason the leaflet gives you.
The rate and the hours above are illustrative and this is a fictional business. The point is the method: your fittings, your hours, the rate printed on your own bill.
Questions people actually ask
Energy savings — frequently asked
Do plug-in energy saving boxes work?
No. A residential meter bills real power in kilowatt-hours, and a small device plugged into one outlet does not change how much of that your refrigerator, dryer, oven or air conditioner consumes. These are usually marketed on “power factor correction”, which is a real engineering concept that applies to industrial billing arrangements and does nothing for a domestic bill. We do not sell them and we would encourage you not to buy them.
So does anything actually reduce my bill?
Yes, and it is unglamorous: using less, and using it for less time. Electrically, the biggest levers in a house are heating and cooling, hot water, and the refrigerator — none of which an electrician fixes with a gadget. Lighting is a genuine but smaller lever, and it is arithmetic we can do with your own numbers.
How do you calculate what an LED retrofit saves?
Fitting count, wattage before and after, realistic hours of use per fitting, and your actual rate per kilowatt-hour off your own bill. Multiply, and you have annual savings you can check yourself. Divide the job cost by that, and you have a payback period. We do it in front of you and we leave you the working.
What if the arithmetic does not pay back?
Then we tell you not to do the job. This happens regularly in houses that already have LED lamps in most fittings, where a further retrofit pays back over a period long enough to be meaningless. There are often better things to do with the same money, and sometimes the better thing is nothing.
Will a new panel or new wiring lower my bill?
No, and if anybody tells you otherwise, be careful about the rest of what they are telling you. A rewire, a panel or a service upgrade is about safety and capacity. None of them makes your appliances draw less. There are excellent reasons to do all three; a lower bill is not one of them.
Are smart controls worth it?
Sometimes, and the honest version is specific. Controls that actually change behaviour — a thermostat that stops heating an empty house, occupancy sensing in rooms people leave lit, timers on outdoor lighting — save real energy. Controls that only add an app to something you were already switching off by hand save nothing and add a support problem.
Bring your own bill
Have us do the arithmetic
If somebody has quoted you a lighting retrofit on the promise of a percentage saving, bring us the quote and one of your bills. We will work out what it actually saves, and if the answer is that it does not pay back we will tell you so and charge you nothing for the conversation.