Oakes Provost's House Retrofit

The following report is by Robert Jones, a member of the PowerSave Campus team as well as the Carbon Fund Student Facilitator within the Sustainability Office. The PowerSave Team retrofitted the Oakes Provost's House by replacing old, inefficient lightbulbs with new LED lights. 

"My team and I finished up the LED retrofit at the Oakes Provost house last week, and I, for one, am very happy with the results! The process of the retrofit didn’t go without a small hiccup, as expected with any project, but was nonetheless completed in only a couple of hours. Lesson learned; playing with light fixtures can cause faulty wires to trip the circuit breaker. If you’re going to work with lamps and electronics, make sure to be safe!

We ended up replacing a mixture of 17 fluorescents and incandescents with more efficient LEDs. The total expected savings over the LED’s lifetime is about 4,700 kWh. This is equivalent to saving about 1 ton of CO2 from going into the atmosphere. I highly recommend taking advantage of the simplicity and practicality of an LED retrofit. Minimal planning, installation time, and experience required to accomplish a LED retrofit make it one of the most effective ways to reduce energy consumption in a residential building.

As I look back on my experience working with Regina at her residence, the Oakes Provost house, I realize I have learned a lot. I will use what I’ve learned for future retrofits at other Provost residence homes, I hope! I now know what exactly to tell the Provosts what to expect in terms of timing, logistics, and how the actual retrofit will work. I’m looking forward to speaking with other UCSC Provosts that have homes on campus to see if they will be interested in having our team complete a retrofit at their home!"