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So last Friday I had a bit of a light bulb moment. What that has to do with Food24 will become clear later.

I was having a pub lunch at Barristers in the Southern Suburbs after being enticed with an invitation to come and enjoy green pints. Paddy’s Day is in March (no, that was not my light bulb moment), but something interesting must be going on. Also you NEVER have ask me twice to a pub lunch on a Friday afternoon. For work.

So, Kudu, Paddy (my car) and myself headed South to Newlands.

We walked in expecting to see a green pint or 2 waiting on the bar, instead the owner, Lance introduced me to 2 very interesting chaps from Philips. They got my attention when they told me that hey have apparently chopped a whopping 30% off his electricity bill – (it is significantly lower now than it was in 2008).

So restaurant owners especially listen up.

This is what Lance had to say about these good looking light bulbs:

“Late last year we decided to replace all our lights with the latest LED technology in an effort to reduce our power consumption. We are a big burner of lights.

I met up with Ross Blakeway (he uses Barristers as his “office”), a lighting specialist and he recommended Philips. We started to replace our normal lights with Philips LEDs in and eventually in March we received 4 special dimmable bulbs for our tiffany shades above the bar… very expensive, but guaranteed for 25 000 hours and aesthetically pleasing.

Little did I know at the time, but Philips had just won $10m from the US Government for the most advance LED for this specific bulb (it was reported in Time Magazine in May) and while I knew we were the first restaurant in Cape Town to install these, I never realized that in fact we are very probably one of the first restaurants in the world to do so, as the bulb was only launch commercially in April 2012 in the USA and was only installed into the Empire State Building in the last week in June.

The results though are quite spectacular… for example the 4 x 100 watt incandescent lamps = 400watt which we had above the bar counter, are now 4 x 12 w = 48 watt and at a quick count we have replaced 106 incandescent bulbs burning 6 520 watts with LED’s burning around 880 or 13.5% of our previous lighting power consumption.

This saving together with other management measures, including  moving to more LPG appliances in our kitchen, which we have been upgrading since November last year,  has led to a 30% reduction in our rand cost of electricity since acquiring Barristers in 2008, despite the hikes in the tariffs.

The reality is that lighting is (perhaps was?) the biggest portion of our electricity usage as we have no option but to have lights on for 18 hours a day!

Check out “the L-Prize” on Wikipedia/Google for more background info… if every restaurant converted to LEDs the savings would be huge.”

So there you have it straight from the horse’s mouth. Speaking of horses, Lance has his SAB beers delivered by horse and carriage from the SAB brewery nearby on the first Friday of every month. And speaking of Fridays – he now has his own cannon – which he fires off at noon every Friday to herald the weekend. Now that is my kind of Publican.

So that is the story of the green beer, horse drawn deliveries and energy efficient light bulbs. If you want to find out more about these cool light bulbs please email me on cath@food24.com.

PS  –  if the new lightbulbs are not enough to entice you to Barristers they have an awesome pub lunch menu with meals for R35 – and loads of great (green) beers on tap.