Warehouse lighting has come a long way! It used to be high pressure sodium and HID, and then transitioned to T8 and T5 fluorescent highbays 20-some years ago. Fast forward to the 2020’s, and you would be a fool to not invest in LED for your warehouse lighting.
Often times warehouse lighting is on for long hours, so it makes it easy for companies to reach a payback. More than that, warehouses are vital cogs of organizations, and it’s important to be able to see well in them! Workers need to be able to pick out product and operate machinery like forklifts in well-lit areas to reduce injuries and mistakes. Choosing the right LED system to upgrade to will result in improved footcandle ratings to transform your warehouse in addition to saving money!
Most often you will see T8 and T5 systems get retrofitted to LED. You may have a 4′ 6-lamp T5HO fluorescent highbay. If it is in good condition, you may wish to just retrofit those bulbs with Type A LED T5 lamps or Type B LED T5 lamps. Need to add more fixtures to a setup like this? You can buy LED tube-ready highbay fixtures that come pre-wired to install Type B LED T5 tubes.
The other option is to replace your fluorescent or HID warehouse lights with new LED fixtures. Generally this means going with a Round LED Highbay or Linear LED Highbay fixture. These are highly efficient and there are numerous options to add on if needed, such as emergency battery backup, aluminum dome reflectors and sensors or other controls.
Speaking of which, lighting controls are a huge part of warehouse lighting. A lot of money can be saved by installing sensors on these highbay fixtures so that lights are turned off or reduced in output when a given aisle in the warehouse is unused for example. A simple microwave sensor works wonders (programmed so that it makes sense for your given application). You might also consider a bluetooth mesh wireless lighting control system if you would like to group and/or individually control fixtures.
