LED and retrofits
LED and Retrofits
Fluorescent-to-LED upgrades indoors and out, plus commercial parking lot pole retrofits, with Lithonia gear and an estimate back inside 24 business hours.
Chapter 01
The tube that has been buzzing for a year
A fluorescent fixture rarely fails cleanly. It flickers for a while first, hums at a pitch you stop noticing, or takes two or three tries to strike when the switch goes on. The tube itself is usually the cheapest part in the fixture, so most people relamp it and move on, but a ballast on its way out will keep doing the same thing to the next tube, and the one after that.
That is throwing money at a fixture that was already telling you what was actually wrong with it. Once a ballast starts failing, replacing tubes on a cycle is a maintenance cost with no end date, and the fixture itself is usually old enough that LED has come down in price well past the point of relamping making sense.
Lightning Electrical technician wiring an overhead fluorescent fixture in a metal-roofed structure
Ballast bypass, full fixture, or wafer
There are three different jobs hiding under the word retrofit, and we decide which one fits by looking at the fixture and the ceiling it is in. A ballast bypass keeps the existing housing and rewires it to run an LED tube directly off line voltage, which is the fastest and cheapest option where the housing itself is in good shape. A full fixture replacement makes sense once the housing is damaged, discolored, or simply the wrong shape for how the space is used now.
A wafer retrofit is a different animal again, mostly for residential ceilings that are already finished. It replaces a recessed can or an old flush fixture with a thin LED wafer that mounts through the existing ceiling opening, so there is no cutting a new hole or patching drywall. Color temperature gets picked to match how the room is used, warmer in a bedroom or dining room, closer to daylight in a kitchen or a shop floor, and the gear behind all of it is Lithonia, indoors and out.
Chapter 03
What changes on the bill afterward
The obvious change is the power bill, since LED draws a fraction of what fluorescent or metal halide pulled for the same light output. The less obvious change is the maintenance calendar: no more ballasts to replace on a cycle, and an LED driver simply lasts longer than the fixture it used to feed.
Every retrofit carries the same one year warranty on material and labor as the rest of our work. On both residential LED replacement and commercial parking lot pole retrofits, we aim to have an estimate back inside 24 business hours, because most of what decides the price is visible on the first walk-through.
Nazir Ahmad, Google: 'Lightening Electrical are quick, good price and does the job right. I would highly recommend the Lightning Electrical team for small or big projects.'
“I had Lightning do a lot of work at my house, they installed about 20 LED wafers, did my bathroom sconces, installed three fixtures outside, redid the fixture over my dining room table and replaced all the fans in my house. The whole time it was Dillon and Manuel working, and they did a great job. They braved the super hot attic, they were super patient whenever I asked them to revise or double check anything, and they were careful with clean up of any insulation and other debris that came out of the ceiling.”
That job ran the full range of what a retrofit can cover in one visit: recessed wafers, sconces, outdoor fixtures, a dining room chandelier and every fan in the house, all inside a hot attic in Hutto.