While lighting maintenance is important for anyone, it's especially important for businesses to keep their products, stores, and warehouses well illuminated. It's irritating when one of the bulbs in your living room ceiling fixture goes out, but typically you can ignore it until it's convenient to replace it. When, on the other hand, it's a bulb in the display case in your store, a light over an assembly area, or a lamp in your parking lot, however, you can't just ignore it: it can impact customers' impressions, make your workers' jobs more difficult, or compromise the safety of your property.

Here are 3 tips to simplify lighting maintenance.

Keep Spares On Hand

And make sure they're the right bulbs. It can be tempting to save money by purchasing just what you need, but you'll eliminate having an unsightly mix of color temperatures down the road if you order extras of the same model number.

In addition to normal and expected end-of-useful-life replacements, the lifespan of some lighting technologies can inadvertently be reduced by running them at higher voltages than they're rated for, exposure to cold, heat and vibrations, and frequent cycling (turning the light on for a short time and back off). Make it easy to replace old or faulty lamps by keeping spares in stock.

Don't Wait for Burnout

The light output of any lamp gradually decreases over time. You may not be consciously aware of this slow reduction in brightness, but the dimming lights can lead to increasing eyestrain, and even contribute to safety issues. Don't wait for your bulbs to burn out before replacing them. Use their rated lifespan and lumen depreciation rate as a guide. For example, older metal halide lamps lose about 30-50% of their light over the course of their rated hours. If you don't want your area to be half as lit as it started out, plan to replace those bulbs before the end of the rated life. LED and fluorescent lights have a much longer lifespan and much slower lumen depreciation.

Upgrade to a Longer-Life Lamp

Businesses can go through incandescent lights every few months. Fluorescents can make it a year or so. High-intensity discharge (HID) lighting extend use a bit longer—but the real winner is LED lighting, which offers, on average, a 50,000-hour operating lifespan. Replace your existing bulbs and lamps with LED, and you won't have to worry about them again for 5, 10, or nearly 20 years, depending on how many hours a year you run those lights. LED bulbs also have the advantage of being unaffected by vibrations and colder temperatures.

While you're looking at your lighting maintenance program, it can be a good time to look at your overall lighting and whether it's meeting your business's needs. Make note of any area where lighting can be improved in the interests of preventing injuries, increasing security, improving employee productivity, and making your public areas more appealing. LED lighting offers many unique and flexible lighting solutions that you may not have thought of, from LED panel lights to magnetic light strips.

The ELEDLIGHTS.com team can help you upgrade your lighting to LED or plan additional lighting for your business—just get in touch! Call or text our West Coast facility at 858.581.0597, our East Coast facility at 215.355.7200 or email sales@eledlights.com.