Free Poster Downloads to Help You Reduce Lighting Usage

After having completed our carbon emissions report we found that lighting was our biggest electricity drain at the office. We’re now implementing several initiatives to reduce our lighting use. One of which is the installation of motion sensors in key areas around the building. This is already starting to pay off. More on motion sensors in a later post.

Bird Tree Sun

Picture by Danzo08

For now I’m going to talk about reducing lighting usage through improved awareness.

Having announced in our office News the significance lighting has on our overall carbon emissions, we’ve already seen a really positive response from everyone. Asking whether lights are really needed or if they’re just used because they’re there is something more people have started doing.

For example, when you walk into a room, do you flick all the light switches on or do you just use the ones you need?

You think about these things sometimes, but do you think about them all the time?

Moving thoughts down the right path

Increasing awareness is probably less a case of educating and more a case of getting the neuron pathways in peoples brains to align in the right positions more frequently.

When you first drive a car your conscious thought processes are consumed entirely with the task of operating the vehicle. As the neuron pathways in your brain get used to aligning in the right way, the task of driving becomes second nature. That’s because electrical signals can pass along the pathways in your brain faster, making something that you’ve practised a lot, become easier. This is the aim of increasing awareness.

If we want people to reduce their usage of lighting to a more sensible (less wasteful) level, it’s a case of making that way of thinking second nature.

Varying the medium of communication

Not only does awareness communication need to be sustained at an adequate frequency to be absorbed, it needs various forms of sensory input. Association will improve the effectiveness of the messages.

You associate messages by simply threading them into regular conversation. For example, “It’s a beautiful day today”.

“Yes, we really don’t need these lights on do we?”.

This is something we all do naturally. You can do something similar by putting a poster up next-to a problem light switch.