Practical advice on commercial lighting from LED retrofits to lighting design.

Healthcare facilities are created to focus on one thing: providing quality care for patients. Unlike other commercial buildings, hospitals and medical centers require lights on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means a constant schedule of replacing burnt out light bulbs.

Healthcare facilities spend an alarming amount of money. The total tops $8 billion in the U.S. every year.

A big reason for those costs – everything is constantly running. Lights and HVAC need to be on all day, every day. Patient safety and care is a top priority.

There are four ways to immediately reduce those high costs and improve the experience for patients and employees.

If you operate a large facility, you probably keep stock of fluorescent tubes so you can promptly replace any failed bulbs. Often times, we talk to customers who want to use up their existing fluorescent tube stock before they move forward with an LED upgrade.

This had us curious. What's the cost of waiting to switch to LED?

Hopefully you haven’t experienced this scenario. You buy a new TV. You plug it in. Then a thunderstorm hits, lightning strikes, and zap! There goes your new TV.

You're probably thinking, if only I had plugged the TV into a surge protector.

Linear fluorescent lamps have been a staple in the lighting industry for their efficiency, long life, and relatively low up-front cost. We sell as many of them as just about anything else.

With so many of our customers using linear fluorescents, we're frequently asked about opportunities to retrofit the lamps to LED.

We’ve covered similar topics in other posts which you may want to read, but for now, we want to focus on the pros and cons of linear fluorescent and linear LED tubes.

Linear LED tubes come in a few varieties – plug-and-play, ballast bypass, remote driver, and some combinations of these configurations, making it possible to go LED in linear fixtures designed for fluorescents, with ballasts and all.

Are LED tubes the best option for replacing your fluorescents?