LED Retrofits and Energy Management: Keeping Costs Low!

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LED retrofits can form a useful contribution to your energy management. Keeping your energy costs down is essential for mid-range commercial or manufacturing companies in today’s business world. Additional costs have already impacted your sourcing and transport bills. So reviewing your lighting fixtures makes sense.

To make it easier to see how and why, we’ll take a closer look at retrofit LEDs here!

What Are LED Retrofits?

They’re essentially the same as LED upgrades. The acronym LED is flashed around (sorry!) in many areas now – from computer keyboard backlighting and screens, to shop strip lighting, street lighting, bedside clocks, and car brake lights. The acronym stands for Light Emitting Diode, and retrofitting simply means applying LED lighting in places where you already have – for instance – fluorescent, halogen, or incandescent fixtures.

Are Retrofit LED Bulbs Worth It?

The way to decide if it’s worth it for you is to conduct an onsite audit. This allows you to locate any cost-effective and safe places where you could use upgrades. The audit also allows you to gather important information from staff. This might include:

• How they’re using the lighting.
• How often they use it.
• Whether they need improved lighting for their work.

Deciding if you need LED retrofits will therefore result from the specific needs you’ve discovered plus the general benefits that LED retrofits offer. For instance:

• an overall need for energy cost reduction in your business,
• a preference for reducing lighting maintenance costs,
• wanting to install industrial lighting solutions that allow variation in color quality to improve lighting and increase staff comfort,
• improving warehouse lighting solutions in different areas for safety reasons, or
• accessing specific customizations that allow you to locate state-provided financial incentives.

There are many more specific needs that cause firms to undertake LED retrofitting, but the two prime benefits are worth a closer look: energy cost reduction and reduced maintenance costs.

Two Key Benefits of LED Retrofits

1 Energy Cost Reduction

You’ll see from your bills that large sums of money go towards energy provision! LED retrofitting is therefore a great choice for commercial buildings and industrial businesses of any size. That’s because LEDs consume up to 80% less energy than fluorescent or other traditional lighting methods (the figures vary according to which type you have).

Of course, reducing energy consumption in today’s world makes for a greener business in social responsibility terms. And staff and customers now expect it and judge you on it.

However, LEDs will also save your business money over their lifetime. If you can reduce your energy bill significantly (and that “up to 80% less consumption” is a good figure to bear in mind!), you’ll be able to ride the wave of inflation and other market pressures with less stress. Retrofitting LEDs is therefore both an immediate and a long-term saving for your business, and worth considering.

2 Reduced Maintenance Costs

Another positive of LED retrofitting is that you’ll reduce your maintenance costs considerably. If you’ve ever realized how often normal light bulbs fail in your home, you can imagine the multiplier effect in your business where you have so many more! Your LED lights can last as long as 100,000 hours.

For this reason, it makes sense to reduce the frequency of replacement and labor costs involved.

Other Considerations

When switching over to LED lighting, you’ll find you have to make choices that will affect your initial outlay.

1 You have fixtures in your ceilings, walls, and other places that contain the bulb or tube. If you want to keep those fixtures in order to save additional expenditure, you’ll find you have a more limited choice of light that will work with them.

We understand the up-front costs of LED retrofitting are not small, so this might be the first thing you consider: maintaining your fixtures. But keep in mind the following point…

2 The second consideration is that – according to your type of premise – you may want or need a specific style of light. This is only possible if you replace both the light and the fixture.

3 The final consideration here is that if you use dimmers, you will nearly always have to change to hardware specifically designed to dim LED lights.

All these considerations will be part of your energy management strategy – you want the LED retrofit for its benefits but you want to avoid extra expenses in difficult times. So let’s take a brief look at energy management before we finish this article.

What Is Energy Management?

LED retrofits are simply part of this bigger issue: How will you manage your energy needs and usage going forward? As we’ve described in a previous post, energy management is a proactive approach to adjusting all your energy consumption via

• good procurement knowledge to manage risks,
• tracking of energy market trends, and
• reconsidering and auditing all energy use within your facilities for reasons of both efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Although the main goal of energy management is to reduce costs within your organization in these ways, having a system in place can also help you

• satisfy environmental requirements as per your state laws
• take advantage of a state-required facility survey that allows you to benefit from energy sales tax
• respond to incentives to reduce power load during harsh weather conditions.

Ready To Take Action on LED Retrofitting?

Your decision about LEDs will be part of your overall energy management strategy. However, if you’re looking for industrial or commercial lighting solutions as a way to save money long term, LED retrofitting is an excellent step in the right direction.

And knowing that LED retrofits and energy management go hand in hand to reduce energy costs, you may feel an energy advisor would be the best option to help you succeed in all these areas, knowledgeably and successfully.

Rapid Power has been a trusted energy advisor since 2002, a one-stop shop helping businesses save money on their bills. We’re not “another broker” but a reliable part of your energy saving team.

To provide you with an accurate LED solution, we walk your facility auditing fixtures, applications, and personnel feedback and then customize the best solution for you. We also help you navigate the red tape of all those financial incentives we mentioned!

If you’d like to put us to the test, call us on 4697591450 to discuss LEDs or send us an energy bill for a free analysis for overall energy management purposes. We’ll be delighted to help you plan your energy future today!

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