The Benefits of LED Lighting Retrofits

Steve Born, Vice President, Client Services at Kieffer Starlite, and Daryl Foreman, Senior Vice President of Sales at Principal LED, gave host Hilary Kennedy a quick tutorial on lighting retrofits for signs. Born dove in with an explanation on what exactly an LED lighting retrofit is.

“An LED lighting retrofit is an upgrade to an existing sign when we want to update to a more efficient, effecting lighting source in your existing sign,” Born said. “Typically, we see that with channel letters on your building, but it is not limited to that. We also do retrofits on cabinet signs for buildings [and] for pylon signs and monument signs. So, any ground signs and whatnot.”

The retrofitting process includes:

• Swapping the lighting with the new LEDs
• Getting all the wiring in place
• Cleaning up the existing signage to make everything look as good as new again

Foreman said that there are two crucial factors to weigh when considering a retrofit: energy savings and savings on maintenance.

“Just as important as those hard numbers are, sometimes the soft benefits of LEDs will convince a customer to switch,” Foreman said. “The sign is the frontline of a company’s image, and no customer likes for their sign to be out. One benefit of LEDs is they typically do not fail catastrophically like the fluorescent lamp or like neon. They will slowly fade over time, but that’s a long period of time.”

With all of the benefits of retrofitting an existing sign’s lighting to LED, it makes sense not to start from scratch just because the lights went out.