Peter O'Donnell: Helping Small Businesses with Big Electric Bills

Little things build loyal customers when running a small business. Do you stock his favorite magazine or her preferred brands?

Only in San Francisco can you find French cabinets, Japanese tansu, Turkish carpets, Buddhas from Bali, vegetarian wraps and Italian pastries on the same block. It's our small business smorgasbord, so click your red heels, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore.

Power Savers, the lighting retrofit program from the SF Department of the Environment, is gearing up to help. The program is designed to keep our unique melting pot of small businesses on a rosy warm glow. Like any good government programs, it's about money. Now do I have your attention, small business owners?

The easiest way to increase your cash flow is to retrofit your interior lights. Why is it nobody pays attention to the cost of energy until the lights go out? Or until the bill arrives?

If you have savings in your ceiling, Power Savers will find them. Are you using old, fat fluorescent tubes? Then we can save you a bundle. You should easily save enough for an extra dinner out with family and friends. Maybe even hot dogs and sodas at Pac Bell Park.

Are you ready for new, thin compact fluorescent tubes - technically called T-8s - that boost your cash flow? Power Savers thinks so.

Here are a few businesses that benefited early from the program:

Party Animals on Polk Street - great for one-stop pet pampering - spent $280 to save $154 every year. The lighting work pays for itself in 20 months of reduced bills. And a few extra doggie snacks for Toto;

New Beauty on Polk Street - They invested $299 to save $329 per year - an easy business decision;

Artisans of San Francisco on Union Street - The frame shop invested $1,272 in new lighting to save $710 annually.

Power Savers will have 4,000 such stories to tell. However, it's no free lunch program. Power Savers does a custom lighting survey and presents a financial summary or anticipated savings for your approval. Say "go" and a team of installation contractors and quality control folks arrive to lighten up your fixed costs. Only after approvals by all parties will you pay a portion of the retrofit cost - Power Savers makes up the difference with significant incentives.

You save and your sales improve. Your products look better and the neighborhood shines brighter as well. In the end, we all buy less power.

So how do you get yours? Simply fax your electricity bill from your commercial business location, plus your name, phone number and best time to call, to Power Savers at (415) 355-3750. Or you can bike to 11 Grove St. and drop it off at SF Environment's EcoCenter. A really nice person then calls to qualify you into the program and schedule your lighting survey.

That's the skinny on Power Savers. Instead of making things harder for small business, we'd rather see you go out for dinner a little more often. So when you look at your ceiling, remember: Fat tubes bad; skinny tubes good.

Peter O'Donnell is a Senior Energy Specialist at the SF Department of the Environment.