Lumen Aid
About Lumen Aid
Lumen Aid is a budgetary operating-cost model built to make lighting retrofit decisions clear, defensible, and transparent. It compares Existing versus New conditions across energy, maintenance, disposal, and labor—turning scattered assumptions into a structured, repeatable audit.
Lumen Aid is designed for contractors, distributors, facility teams, and anyone who needs a fast, credible way to quantify savings and communicate payback without spreadsheets or guesswork.
What Lumen Aid Does
Side-by-side cost modeling
Each project is organized into named areas, with Existing and New scenarios displayed together. Every area can be added, removed, and independently configured, allowing simple rooms or multi-building sites to be modeled in one workspace.
Existing scenario
Lumen Aid captures the real operating profile of legacy systems:
- Watts per lamp, lamps per fixture, and optional ballast modeling
- Lamp and ballast life entered as rated hours, years-at-duty, or calendar years
- Material, labor, and disposal costs scaled from relamp cycles and inventory
- Labor hours entered as decimal hours per service event
This ensures maintenance cost is tied to actual replacement behavior—not generic multipliers.
New scenario
The New side is driven by your product catalog API, with:
- Interior/exterior catalog tier
- Family → type → product selection
- Catalog watts per fixture, with optional manual override
- Fixture life, replacement cost, disposal, and one-time retrofit labor
Override logic is explicit: when watt override is off, Lumen Aid tracks the existing total W/fixture for comparison clarity.
Site Inputs and Schedules
Each area has two independent input sets—one for Existing, one for New:
- Annual hours (direct entry or weekly schedule presets, including overnight and 24/7)
- $/kWh, installer labor rate, fixture counts, and labor assumptions
This allows post-retrofit fixture quantities, tariffs, and schedules to differ from the baseline, producing realistic savings.
Roll-ups, Reporting, and Savings
Lumen Aid produces:
- Annual cost breakdowns for Existing or New (all areas)
- Per-area lines showing fixtures, hours, rates, totals, and catalog data
- PDF export aligned with the report view
- Savings metrics: demand, kWh, energy cost, maintenance/disposal, payback, and ROI
Payback and ROI use one-time retrofit labor as the investment basis, unless equipment cost is intentionally folded into that line.
Project Persistence and Sharing
- Project name and notes
- Save/load audits (members), using JSON payload version 3 with
areas[] - Read-only share links for clients or internal review
Transparency by Design
Lumen Aid avoids “black-box” calculations. On-screen notes explain:
- How connected load is derived
- How lamp-unit maintenance differs from fixture-level events
- How Existing vs New watt semantics are applied
Every number is traceable, every assumption visible.