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When the Early Bird Just Turns on the Lights
It is not rare to hear about a supervisor or foreman showing up to work early every day. When you’re the boss, there are always plenty of details to check on before the workday even begins.
Sometimes those early-morning quiet moments are extremely productive. Many business owners will tell you that they get their most important work done when the coffee is fresh and the office is silent.
But not every pre-dawn activity involves deep strategic thinking and long-term planning about how to run your business, how to deliver value to your customers, and how to take care of your employees for years to come. Let’s keep it real for a moment.
The sad fact is that a lot of business owners have to get to work earlier than everybody else because it takes 20 minutes for the lights to come on in the warehouse.
And that’s just the first thing wrong with legacy HID high bay lighting. So what is so special about LED high bay lighting? We are glad you asked!
Source: iStock
Instant On Lighting? What a Concept!
Anyone who has spent any time in a gym or airplane hangar or a warehouse distribution center with HID lighting can tell you about the time it takes for the lights to come on. The normal early morning routine involves flipping the switch, listening to the hum, and making your way through semi-darkness to the coffee pot while you wait for the lights to come on.
After so many years of waiting, it can feel like a miracle when modern LED high bay lighting gets installed. Suddenly, your work environment illuminates the same way all the other spaces in your life do – instantly.
It might seem like a minor inconvenience, waiting around every morning to begin operations at your facility. But that time adds up, it surely does, and if you really put the pencil to it you might find you’ve spent an obscene amount of time in your life just hanging around waiting on lights.
How long would you stay calm if it took 20 minutes for the water to start flowing, or for your garage door to open? What other services in your life feature a built-in 20-minute delay every time you use them?
Save Money With a Purpose in Mind
Now that we’re thinking about saving time, how about saving money, too? Saving money should always be important for a business owner. And yet, when you operate legacy HID high bay fixtures at your facility, you’re actually paying a premium for…what exactly? For a superior experience?
Everybody knows that LED lighting is significantly more energy-efficient than legacy HID lighting. Average savings of well over 60% are not just common, they’re standard at this point.
However, many business owners continue to spend extra money each month because they feel like their legacy lighting system is the one they know, even if it is slow and expensive to maintain. (This is an excellent point to look up the term “Sunk Cost Fallacy”.)
For these business owners, the idea of changing the lighting at their facility might feel overwhelming. Therefore, they just keep putting it off because after all, they already have lights, and, you know, etc.
What this situation calls for is a little more pencil and paper time, just a few moments really, to actually calculate savings month after month and year after year. What would you do with the money you don’t have to spend on your energy bill this year?
DOWNLOAD NOW: FSG COMMERCIAL LIGHTING GUIDE WITH PRINTABLE LIGHTING WORKSHEETS
Facility owners that make the switch to LED high bay lighting immediately understand the power of their decision in terms of reduced OPEX and maintenance & repair expenses. Once they do, they wonder why they waited so long, and they start planning for other ways to use the money they saved.
Something wonderful happens when a business owner stops thinking about how to do more with less and begins considering how to do more with a sudden windfall. Make the switch from legacy HID facility lighting to modern high bay LED and begin saving with a purpose
Safety and Efficiency Go Hand in Hand
At many warehouse facilities across the country today, inefficient, blinking, and buzzing legacy HID lighting contributes to incidents and accidents that could be avoided with better lighting. Only after seeing the difference crisp, bright LED lighting offers can you truly appreciate the risk associated with poor lighting.
Often, HID bulbs fail over weeks and sometimes months. In fact, it is common for HID bulbs to lose 70% of their brightness over their life span.
Where exactly in that life span of efficiency loss are the bulbs in your warehouse today? Do they still look pretty good? Do you think they have a good amount of juice left in them? How about those blinking lights at the back of the warehouse? Are they going to hang on for another week or two?
You see, that’s the kind of thinking many business owners have gotten used to over the years, and it’s a shame. But it’s really a shame for that new forklift driver, and for that good lady who really did check to see if the parts were in inventory but missed those boxes back there in the shadows.
Source: iStock
Safe operations and efficient operations are both supported by clear, bright light. Remove the shadows in your warehouse and give everyone a chance to do their best job at work.
And speaking of efficiency, consider the fact that modern high bay LED lights include sensors that dim lights when no activity is detected below, and instantly brighten when workers move to less-used areas in the warehouse.
In the end, there really is no good argument for keeping your old high bay lighting. Legacy HID high bay lighting is wasteful on several levels, some of which are easier to see than others.
The value of your time and your employee’s safety is almost impossible to measure. Your electric bill, on the other hand, is a documented fact you have to face every month.
So hopefully, we’ve been able to get you thinking about the benefits of LED high bay lighting. Before we go, let’s take a quick look at some FSG customers who have already made the switch and are thrilled about the change better lighting has brought to their business.
LED High Bay Lights Success Stories
Dillard’s: Dillard’s department stores came to FSG looking for a better lighting solution for one of their largest distribution centers.
FSG installed LED high bay lights to replace the aging metal halide lights which had been in place. The results were nothing less than transformative. The staff inside the distribution center were safer and had a much easier time reading labels and identifying items on shelves thanks to the better light.
Perhaps the biggest, most tangible result Dillard’s received was the rebate check from their utility: over $66,000. For one distribution center.
Holt Caterpillar: LED high bay lights are a huge boon to industrial organizations. Holt Caterpillar, a heavy equipment dealer in Texas, needed to make its operations better.
Their previous lights were dim, creating an unsafe working environment which was especially problematic because of the nature of Holt’s business. Their maintenance costs were also out of control as they were relying on a local electrician to merely replace (rather than improve) any burned-out lights.
FSG partnered with General Electric to completely redesign Holt’s lighting across their shops and large storage facilities. The response was unanimous: everyone who worked around the new lights loved the brighter, safer environment. Holt’s management loved the improved safety of their facilities and the dramatically lowered maintenance and energy costs.
At FSG, We Do High Bay All Day
If your business uses legacy HID high bay lights, you really should give FSG a call. When you find out about the various incentives and rebates available in your area, you might just kick yourself for waiting so long to make the switch to LED.
The good news for you is that when you call, you’ll be in touch with an industry leader who is doing this work somewhere across the country – or maybe just around the corner – right now. We can design, schedule, and execute your lighting project with extreme professionalism.
There are many things to consider when looking at high bay lighting, such as the rated life of the lights, any rebates you might be eligible to use on your project, and how warm or cool your lighting needs to be to serve the purpose of your facility. These are questions we can answer for you.
If you aren’t sure about which high bay LED lights you need, give FSG a call today at (877) 293-6689. We would be honored to visit your location, take a look at your current lighting, and discuss your future plans.
FSG is a full-service lighting contractor. We design, procure, install, maintain, and repair high bay lighting and control systems that support the success of your business. With LED technology, we are able to deliver more value to our customers than ever before.
Visit our website today and lets talk about creating a safer, more efficient, less expensive, and overall better lighting solution for you and your organization.
For customers who already know exactly what they’re looking for, make sure to check out the FSG Online Store. We offer great pricing on a large inventory of the best high bay lighting products from leading manufacturers. Visit the online store today and see for yourself!
