Modern Track Lighting for Commercial, Retail, and Office Environments
Track lighting has long been a popular choice for restaurants, offices, stores, window displays, and spaces of all kinds where recessed ceiling lighting can’t be installed. It’s versatile, able to be used as either accent or task lighting, and easily adjustable, allowing lighting to keep up with changing displays and space layouts. It can also lend a dramatic air or blend into the background.
Track lighting has also long relied on halogen or incandescent bulbs. These lamps run hot, burn out fast, and use a lot of energy along the way. Modern track light heads offer a significantly improved option: LED technology.
Benefits of LED Track Lights to Your Bottom Line
An End to Endless Bulb Replacements
In business, time is money. The more we can do to eliminate needless tasks, the more time our employees can spend on productive, profitable ones. Incandescent bulbs have an average operating life of about 1,000 hours. Halogen bulbs last between 450 and 1,000 hours. If your halogen track lights are in operation 14 hours a day—not atypical for a restaurant or store—you’ll replace every one of your track light bulbs between 5 and 10 times over the course of a year. Let’s say you have 30 track light heads. That’s up to 300 times one of your employees has to get out a ladder every year.
Compare this to LED: With a 50,000 average operating life, LED track light heads will typically perform for ten years, no bulb changes or other maintenance required. Over ten years, our example business above would free themselves from 3,000 halogen bulb changes.
Cool Performance
Halogen and incandescent lamp surface temperatures can run nearly three times higher than LED. This can have a measurable impact on room temperature and increase your warm-weather cooling costs.
While it might be tempting to float the idea that higher-temperature lights supplement your heating system in winter, lighting is a significantly less efficient heat source than your purpose-built HVAC system. You’re better off with lower temperature lighting and letting your heating system do the job it was made for.
The Proof Is in the Electric Bill
All that wasted heat energy produced by halogen and incandescent track light bulbs gets charged to your electric bill. In our example above, those 32W halogen bulbs running hot for 14 hours a day adds $350 in wasted energy to your power costs every year.
When you add in the $150 to $300/year in replacement halogen bulbs, after just two years you’ll have spent about what it would have cost to switch to LED. The difference is that, without making that switch, those extra costs keep going, year after year. By the time ten years have passed, you’d have wasted as much as $4800 on running and replacing 30 halogen bulbs in your track lights.
Or you could switch to LED today and, in the long run, come out way ahead.
Making the Switch (or Choosing LED for New Installs in the First Place)
ELEDLIGHTS.com offers LED track light heads that are compatible with the most common track on the market: 3-conductor H-style. If you’re installing new lighting, we have track sections and live end feeds available as accessories.
Our track lights, available in both black and white to match any décor, are compact, fully adjustable (360° horizontal, 180° vertical), and compatible with Triac dimmers.
Because track lights are often used for retail displays and restaurants, a high color rendering index (CRI) is important: you don’t want your wares or food to look “off.” With a CRI >90, our track lights provide excellent color reproduction.
If you have questions about replacing or installing track lighting, our lighting experts are here to help. You can get in touch using live chat, sending a note to lights@eledlights.com, or calling (215) 355-7200. In the meantime: Take a look at our high-efficiency, high-performance LED track lights for commercial, retail, and office environments.