Commercial Building Lighting
Commercial buildings provide a wealth of opportunities to design functional but creative lighting solutions. LEDs have revolutionized how lighting systems are conceptualized, and given facility managers and lighting designers more options for different sources and quality of light, as appropriate to any area.
About Commercial Building Lighting
Offices
Offers predominate in most commercial buildings, from one-story office parks to skyscrapers housing numerous suites and companies. Fluorescent bulbs and ballasts have long been used to light these areas, although linear LED is gaining in popularity, as well as LED troffers and LED recessed lighting.
Because offices are mainly used during normal business hours only, they present great opportunities for lighting controls like occupancy sensors, which can turn off lights when no one is present. This can represent a significant energy savings.
Lobby Areas
There is often a main lobby to the entire building, as well as numerous company-specific lobbies throughout the facility. Common lights in these areas are recessed downlights, track lighting, and fluorescent fixtures. For energy savings, older CFL pin-based bulbs now have LED replacements, and LED bulbs of all sorts are available for retrofitting.
Conference Rooms
Large or small, an office building may contain numerous conference rooms. While some of these may have LCD flat panels requiring only display mounts, others may utilize entire projection systems, including the digital projector, projection screen, and any lifts or mounts necessary to put it all together.
One easy way to prolong the life of an expensive projector is to replace burned-out projector bulbs. When quality is a concern OEM projector lamps are the way to go, but replacement compatible lamp modules are also an option for businesses on a budget.
Conference rooms can also benefit from lighting controls like dimmers (for when the projector is in use) and occupancy sensors to turn off lights when the room is unused.
Parking Areas
Parking areas are important to help visitors navigate to their vehicles, as well as provide enough light for safe movement at any time. Many parking lots still use metal halide lamps, but there are now economically feasible LED HID replacement bulbs.
Parking garages present different challenges, as they are often darker, possibly underground, and the ceilings not high enough for high-mast lighting. In these cases, fluorescent fixtures and metal halide have been the rule, but LED is quickly replacing some of these due to the need for lower energy costs and less maintenance.
