In commercial buildings office building tenants turn over often enough that it’s difficult to plan build-outs that will satisfy future tenants. Lighting is often a key factor when building out an office to satisfy a new tenant. Because of that there is a chance that you can go through and upgrade the lighting in an office to new LED fixtures only to find out that the next tenant has a different layout in mind using different fixtures.
In this case what do you do with the new led fixtures that were installed?
The easy answer is to re-use them in a new space. That’s great if it can work out, but that’s not always the case.
In this office application our customer had over 100 Direct/Indirect 2×2 LED fixtures less than 1 year old that needed to be removed for a new tenant. With over 100 high quality LED fixtures less than 1 year old the customer wanted to find a place to use them. The common area hallways were 2×4 3 Lamp T8 fluorescent parabolic troffers so they could update the look of the areas that current and potential future tenants see as a first impression on walking in and around the building with these 2×2 LED fixtures. Perfect!?
Why the ?
After assessing the application Premier Lighting determined that 1/3rd of the current 2×4 fluorescent common area hallway fixtures had emergency battery backup capability. None of the 100 plus 2×2 LED fixtures they wanted to reuse had emergency backup capability. That left us with a few options. As with all lighting upgrades you need to weigh out the costs/benefits of each option.
The first option was to determine if we could install supplemental emergency lighting. There was the possibility of doing this, but new power would have needed to be run and installed on sheetrock walls. Doing this would have meant patching/painting sheetrock, etc.. In other words something that would take multiple contractors hours to do ($$$).
That left us with the only solution being that we needed the fixtures to have emergency capability. In checking with the manufacturer of the fixture – they did not have a way to field install emergency lighting in the fixtures and this particular fixture model changed appearance in the last year. That meant if we were to order new 2×2 fixtures from the same manufacturer with emergency backup they would have looked different from the rest of the 2×2’s they currently had.
The only options left were to scrap the idea all together and hope the 100 plus fixtures could be used elsewhere, order all new fixtures or find a way to make the fixtures they had emergency lighting capable. The only practical option in this case was to find a way to get the existing fixtures to have emergency backup. After running tests and consulting with several manufacturers it was determined that this item could be installed in the existing fixtures: Keystone’s KT-EMRG-LED-5-500-EN /DF
Premier Lighting’s mission is to provide our customers with the optimal and practical lighting system. This is just one example of the thousands of lighting upgrades we have done over the last 25 years.
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