LED’s are sweeping the lighting landscape. Mainly because of their ability to decrease energy costs, lower maintenance expenses, and increase the overall performance of your lighting. However, because of the amount of LED lights on the market. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with information as you consider an LED retrofit company for your organization. In today’s article, we will look at five important items to keep at the forefront of your mind as you begin the research process.

How Does an LED Retrofit Impact Your Business?

First and foremost whenever you are evaluating a new initiative like an LED retrofit, it’s imperative to look at the economics of the project. Will the initial outlay of capital in the short term save you time, money and resources in the long term? Well to answer that question you need to look at the factors involved.

Energy Expense

When evaluating lighting expenses you quickly realize that energy costs are the bulk of your budget. In most cases, energy comprises 80% of the total costs. Depending on the size of the space that you are lighting, switching to LEDs could save you a significant amount. When LEDs are compared to traditional HID or fluorescent lighting the energy savings typically fall between the 50% – 80% range.

Lighting Performance

Beyond the financial benefits of LED lighting, there is significant upgrades in light performance. The advancements in color quality and innovative features like progressive dimming are just a few of the great options that LEDs provide. Things like correlated color temperature, which measures the color of light with a numerical value, are crucial if the atmosphere of your office, restaurant, or commercial space is important.

Maintenance Expense

Lighting maintenance can be a less visible expense, this is because it often gets lumped into the overall operational expenses to run the business. However, when parsed out it’s easy to see that lighting maintenance is expensive and time-consuming. Depending on the type of lighting in your facility, you often need to rent bucket trucks to change lamps and ballasts that have gone bad. These expenses can definitely add up when evaluated over a 3 to 5 year time period. By switching to LEDs you drastically extend the lifespan of your lighting, therefore decreasing the frequency of routine maintenance.

Getting Started with an LED Retrofit Company

Understand your goals and objectives

Before you undertake any project, it’s important to specify the goals and expected outcome. Take time to think through the result of an LED retrofit, are your primary goals decreasing your energy expense? Or is lighting performance the most important to your organization? Thinking through these objectives on the front end will guide the process through to a successful completion. Once you have the goals and objectives worked out for your project then look for rebates, offers, and financing options that are available to you. The rebate landscape is rapidly changing and can be tedious to understand and utilize. However, if you can find a rebate for your project it can have a significant financial impact on your project.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking your current numbers is an essential component to knowing if your LED retrofit was a success. This includes knowing your current lighting utility costs, energy usage, lamp wattages, and other factors like installation, project timeline, and funding considerations. Additionally, knowing how much money is being spent on maintaining your existing lighting is pivotal in determining your budget and expected ROI. This includes everything from the costs of new bulbs and materials, to facility downtime because of an outage – all of these factors into your overall costs.

Choosing the Right LED Retrofit Company

Finding a company that understands the quick changing and nuanced industry, and different quality in manufacturers is crucial to ensuring you have a successful retrofit.  At Action Services Group, we work to create a project that is tailored to your budget and desired outcome. Our product-neutral approach provides a wide variety of LED options for every lighting application, and our turn-key capability can provide a single source to help you manage product selection, rebates, project management, and installation.

Conclusion

In conclusion, taking on an LED project is a significant task for any organization large or small. Before embarking on a lighting project it’s important to benchmark your current lighting configuration and understand your lighting expenses. Then prioritize your goals for a retrofit, like: decreased maintenance expenses, increase in lighting performance or lowering energy costs. Once you have your goals in place you can look for a lighting partner to complete the project. If you have any questions about what an LED retrofit might look like for your organization, reach out to us here at Action Services Group by calling 610-558-9773, email [email protected], or schedule a call that fits your needs by clicking the button below.. We would be happy to provide you with a free no-obligation proposal.