Whether your restaurant is a quick-serve, casual, or fine dining establishment, common lighting concerns are facing your industry. Proper lighting is critical for all restaurants, and depending upon the environment. Poor lighting can cause a multitude of issues. For a quick-serve restaurant, you are looking for a well lite establishment that helps produce a fast turnaround. So how do you create the perfect recipe for lighting success? Today we are going to look at the most common non-LED lighting utilized in quick-serve restaurants. Then take a look at the difference an LED retrofits would make in your restaurant.

One of the most common lighting fixtures used in quick-serve establishments is recessed troffers utilizing fluorescent lamps. This form of lighting is typically inexpensive and most commonly comes in 2×4 or 2×2 troffers utilizing either T8 or T12 fluorescent tubes. While inexpensive, they come with a few issues.

While the cost of a fluorescent lamp is lower than most lamps. All fluorescent fixtures operate with 2-4 lamps per fixture. This can cause multiple concerns if a single lamp is having performance issues within the fixture.

• The average energy cost of a single 2×4 troffer utilizing 2 fluorescent lamps will run you $85 per year, multiply that by the total number of troffers in your facility and your energy costs are through the roof.
• Depending upon the type of lamp you are utilizing (T8, T12, or T5). You could be experiencing performance issues. To make matters worse as individual lamps fail, the aesthetics and performance of that fixture diminish.
• Every time you turn a fluorescent lamp on, it degrades the ignition system within the tubes, causing a much shorter lamp life. Your maintenance costs can easily reach over $1000 per fixture, per year.

There are substantial benefits to performing an LED retrofit to your quick-serve restaurants’ fluorescent lighting. One of the significant aspects of retrofitting your fluorescent lighting to LED. Is that you can retrofit the much more efficient LED into your existing lighting application. There are also the energy and maintenance saving aspects, as well as the lighting performance improvements.

• By retrofitting a fluorescent troffer 2×4 to LED, your organization could save $80 per fixture, per year in energy costs.
• LED’s are available in a wide range of CCTs (Correlated color temperature) and CRI (color rendering index). Your illumination would be suitable for any location, be it the customer or staff side of your quick-serve restaurant.
• LED’s are not affected by continually switching them on/off. You can save up to $1000 in maintenance costs for one fixture over the course on a year.

To learn more about fluorescent lighting and the many benefits of an LED retrofit, check out our education pages. An In-depth Look at Fluorescent Lighting An In-depth Look at Troffer Lighting In-depth Look at LED Retrofits

Before any LED retrofit, you need to set your project goals to purchase the right lamps and fixtures to fit your criteria. Are you looking for energy and maintenance savings, or are you focused on your lighting performance? Are you looking to upgrade your kitchen for better illumination for your staff or easier maintenance for your dining area? The LED Industry has thousands of lighting options, and not all of them offer the same results. We recommend reviewing your goals utilizing three savings criteria: Energy, Performance, and Maintenance. For more on setting LED Retrofit goals, check out our eBook: A Critical Guide to Setting Criteria goals for your LED Project Once you have an idea of your LED retrofit goals, we recommend contacting a lighting solutions provider or lighting company that is manufacturer and product-neutral. With neutrality comes a higher focus on your needs as opposed to the desire or limitation of selling a specific product. For more information on LED products and retrofits for your organization, contact Action Services Group by calling 610-558-9773 or email info@actionservicesgroup.com or schedule a call.