It’s reasonably common knowledge that a commercial lighting retrofit will save on energy costs, provide a better environment for your staff and customers, as well as be better for the environment. But no one ever thinks about the maintenance staff! In a commercial space with traditional lighting, your maintenance staff will be up on a ladder, craning their neck twice a year for every single incandescent bulb that blows. Do a quick count in your head for how many bulbs you have, and try and translate that to the number of ladder climbs each year. You might need a calculator. That number is likely to be a tremendous saving in maintenance costs once you switch to LED lighting.
Here’s another way of putting it. Each LED bulbs lasts over 50,000 hours, whereas fluorescent lights only last around 1,000 hours. So for every LED bulb you’d need to (eventually) change, you would have had to climb the ladder to replace the fluorescent bulb 50 times.
Each time that ladder is climbed, it costs you money. But there is more to it than that (yes, it gets worse). For every single bulb that needs replacing (remember that’s every six months per incandescent bulb and every 12 months per fluorescent bulb), you also need to consider:
Let’s get a little more granular to really spell out the maintenance savings from a commercial LED lighting retrofit, from this whitepaper. Take into account the following costs and savings are per bulb.
| LED | High Bay Fluorescent | Incandescent | CFL | |
| Life span (years) | 34 | 1 | 0.5 | 1 |
| Cost of each scheduled maintenance | $0 | $150 | $50 | $50 |
| Cost of bulb or ballast replacement | $0 | $6 | $2 | $6 |
| Frequency of bulb/ballast replacements per light per year | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Maintenance Dollars Spent Annually | $0 | $156 | $104 | $56 |
| LED advantage Annual Maintenance Savings | $156 | $104 | $56 | |
| Total Savings over 34 years | $5,304 | $3,536 | $1,904 |
Forgive us for really hammering it home here, but it you had 200 high bay fluorescent tubes, and switched to LEDs, you could save $31,200 per year in maintenance alone. That’s a staggering one million dollars over the 34 year life span of your 200 LED bulbs; if you haven’t retired by then and are still around to count the savings.
Those savings are on top of the much lauded:
You’re probably kicking yourself a bit as to why you haven’t looked into a commercial LED lighting retrofit by now and wondering where to start. Oh, and naturally you’re motivated by taking pity on your maintenance staff for all their unneeded ladder climbs. Well lucky you, because it’s our job (and mission) to make the process of retrofitting commercial LED lighting as simple as possible. If you’d like to see how we can help you to get started with the whole process, give us a message and we’d be happy to give you some free advice.
We founded LEDBiz to address the rapidly growing market for energy saving solutions through Commercial LED retrofits.
Our team consists of a dedicated staff of MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) experts, NAILD (National Association of Innovative Lighting Distributor) certified lighting professionals, and best-in-class software engineers. We saw an opportunity to help shift the world to a more energy efficient source of lighting that is better for the world and the people in it.