If you’ve followed our blog, LinkedIn, or our  Press Releases, you know that we just moved into our new facility! As part of our agreement with the Building Owners, we provided and installed our products in the non-warehouse areas. I designed the lighting system to incorporate not only fixtures, but also controls. My goal was to take full advantage of  the floor to ceiling windows and our 300+ days of sunshine.

The end result is tremendous, incorporating the controls to maximize daylight harvesting, and the uber efficient LED system provides a peaceful and productive environment.  As I mentioned earlier, this didn’t include the warehouse. I was more focused with maximizing space in the warehouse and put the lighting design on the back burner.

I had an OEM partner in for a meeting this week, and as I gave him the tour I zeroed in on the lighting in the warehouse. When transitioning from the office to the warehouse, its like a time warp, an orange glow from before the time of identifying lighting color with the Kelvin scale. The warehouse lighting is laid out in row after row of 2 lamp 4′ strips end to end, fortunately these had been updated to the newest technology in the 1990’s…T-8’s! I decided we needed to address the warehouse lighting immediately.

We decided to evaluate one area of the warehouse that has 24 of the 2 lamp 4′ fixtures. We took foot candle readings in 4 areas, the average f/c was 15.5. The fixtures were using 32 watt lamps and instant start ballasts consuming 68 watts per fixture, totaling 48 lamps and 1,632 watts for the are

Relamping / Delamping Saves Watts, Costs and Improves Lighting Quality

We decided to delamp and install our 20 watt LED Linear’s. We eliminated 30 lamps and dropped to 360 watts for the area. More importantly we raised the f/c level to an average of 18.3.

End result:

• 62.5% less lamps
• 78% less watts
• 16% increase in f/c.

Not bad for a test, and it saved us the cost of removal and install of new fixtures.