Solution
According to Jamie Meyers, Manager of Sustainability for Walgreen's, “PURE Walgreens is about driving down our carbon footprints primarily by controlling energy. We had been looking at LED for quite a while. And it’s really the Goodyear store that told us it’s time to roll this out on a larger level. So we are rolling out LED lighting to all our new stores moving forward.”
Meyers says of the Goodyear project: “The Cree® products really fit into what we were trying to do. What’s really differentiating Cree is the efficacy of the fixture — the lumen output per watt. Total cost of ownership — that’s really the driver and where LEDs can make their mark.”
The Goodyear store includes a sales floor lit with the Cree CS18™ and CS14™ LED linear luminaires, CR14™ and CR22™ LED architectural troffers in the pharmacy, and SR6™ LED downlights in the waiting and outdoor canopy areas — all backed by Cree’s industry-leading 10-year limited warranty.
Powered by Cree TrueWhite® Technology, the Cree fixtures deliver 90+ CRI, providing exceptional color rendering. These products deliver some of the best light levels in the industry, offering significant energy savings since less power is needed to illuminate the items on all levels of the shelves. And since the Cree LED luminaires are fully dimmable for additional energy management, the store benefits from even greater energy savings.
The previous spec called for 32-watt T8 fluorescents on the sales floor, with 100-watt metal halide fixtures for the outdoor canopy. According to Meyers, “We typically use 25-watt, but we had to jump up to 32 watts in the fluorescent solution so we wouldn’t get any striation when dimmed.”
Adds Meyers: “Especially if you’re introducing daylighting, as we did, the Cree® LED lights work well because they’re already made to dim. You don’t have to put a different piece of equipment on or increase your wattage like you do with fluorescents.”