Lighting up Aotearoa
Energy Efficiency First with Government, the Electricity Sector, City Councils and Local Communities
At Ecobulb we are committed to working with government, the electricity sector, energy trusts, city councils and local communities to deliver large scale energy saving residential and commercial lighting projects and home energy efficiency projects – to reduce consumer power bills, to reduce the need for new power stations and poles and wires to be built and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Our mission is to save enough electricity to power New Zealand for a year – and we are 64% of the way to our goal!
About Us
Energy Mad was founded in 2004 by Tom Mackenzie and Dr Chris Mardon with the aim to get energy saving "ecobulb" light bulbs into 50% of homes in New Zealand in order to "save all the electricity used by Christchurch homes".
Teaming up with Line Trust South Canterbury and Foodstuffs supermarket stores in late 2004, we delivered our first Ecobulb project. Within six weeks, 66% of South Canterbury homes each brought five or more ecobulbs.
We then expanded across New Zealand through 37 ecobulb projects between 2005 and 2009 with the Electricity Commission, power and consumer trusts, the largest electricity retail and distribution companies in New Zealand, Foodstuffs (the largest supermarket chain in New Zealand) and Shell New Zealand. By 2009, 57% of New Zealand homes had our ecobulbs.
We also delivered comprehensive home energy efficiency assessments in 33,000 New Zealand homes through funding provided from Energy Trusts. 11,000 of these households also purchased an insulation and/or efficient heating package, many that were heavily discounted through EECA Warm-Up New Zealand Funding, or purchased an efficient downlight package.
Globally, Energy Mad implemented ecobulb projects with electricity utilities and various retail partners. These included Australia, the United States (in partnership with Walgreens, the world's second largest retail chain - where Energy Mad bulbs were sold in almost 8,000 Walgreens stores), Germany, Spain and Ireland.
Energy Mad was New Zealand's fastest growing company in 2007 with 2,746% growth and listed on the Main Board of the New Zealand Stock Exchange in 2011.
In 2018 Energy Mad co-founder Dr Chris Mardon purchased the Energy Mad assets through Ecobulb Limited and Ecobulb continued where they left off at Energy Mad.
Ecobulb quickly developed the world first screw-in retrofit ecobulb LED downlight, the world’s most efficient residential LED light bulb that was installed in hundreds of thousands of Australian homes, and worked with manufacturing partners to get hundreds of thousands of world leading sensor commercial lighting LED fittings installed into Australian and New Zealand businesses.
In April 2018, Ecobulb teamed up again with LineTrust South Canterbury and EECA for its new ecobulb project. This resulted in a staggering 73% of South Canterbury homes coming in to get free ecobulbs LEDs over two days. Since then we delivered similar results with other New Zealand energy trusts, electricity distribution companies and EECA in the King Country, South Canterbury, Gisborne, North Otago, the Eastern Bay of Plenty, Ashburton and the Waipa region.
In early 2021 Ecobulb partnered with two local energy trusts, two major Māori health organisations and MBIE to deliver an innovative new Home Energy Saver project.
Since then Ecobulb has partnered with the Government, energy trusts, lines companies and city councils for 20 projects in the Far North, Northland, Counties, Auckland, the King Country, the Eastern Bay of Plenty, Whanganui, the Waipa region, Christchurch, and Ashburton. Our 116 locally recruited energy assessors have now completed 11,000 home energy assessments that are saving these home $7.3 million in annual energy bills from the various savings actions implemented.
Ecobulb has a goal to “Save enough electricity to power New Zealand for a year”. With 3.4 million homes in 14 countries having 25 million of our ecobulbs, we are 64% of the way there. Our ecobulbs are saving $6.0 billion electricity and 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Also during our journey of 20 years and counting we have picked up various New Zealand awards for business, energy efficiency, sustainability, clean technology and innovation.
