Acuity Brands, Inc., a market leader in innovative energy-efficient lighting, control and day lighting solutions, announced the availability of Visual Economic Tool™, a leap-forward financial tool that offers a comprehensive, economic analysis to properly evaluate multiple lighting systems and provides superior business assessment than typical “payback” methods.
 
The Visual Economic Tool™ is a free, web-based, user-friendly design tool that uses recommended industry practices to simultaneously estimate and compare the life-cycle costs of up to three lighting systems.
 
“This is a breakthrough tool that provides users with more data, deeper evaluations and more choices,” said Randall King, Director of Illuminating Engineering Services for Acuity Brands Lighting. “You can choose to perform energy-only estimates or input additional information to create estimates that include maintenance, lighting controls and HVAC data. The resulting calculated costs can include economic return as well as life-cycle costs, net present value, and internal rate of return. These second-level analysis methods provide an owner with a better business assessment than the typical payback methods currently employed because they account for the time value of money and total cost of ownership,” said King.