Retail LED retrofits are a well-understood playbook — parking lots, building perimeters, occasional interior lighting. Manufacturing retrofits are different. The constraints are different. The risks are different. The economics are usually better, but the execution is harder.
After dozens of commercial manufacturing projects — production floors, distribution centers, food and beverage facilities, automotive plants — here's what we've learned about doing it right.
The four constraints that define manufacturing retrofits
1. You cannot stop production
Most commercial retail centers can absorb a night install crew. Most manufacturing facilities cannot stop the line. A production shutdown to change lighting is typically off the table — the lost production time dwarfs any lighting savings.
This means installs happen around the shifts, not during them. We work through shift changes, we work on weekends, we work during scheduled maintenance windows. For 24/7 facilities, we phase the work across multiple visits, completing sections during production gaps.
Plan for this in the project timeline. A retail retrofit might take a crew 1-2 weeks on site. The same fixture count in a manufacturing facility can take 3-6 weeks because of phasing around production.
2. Ceiling heights complicate everything
Manufacturing facilities frequently have 20 to 50 foot ceilings. Pole lights on the exterior matter, but the real challenge is high bay interior lighting.
At 30+ foot ceilings, you're working from lifts. Single-person lifts don't reach everywhere. Two-person lifts need clear floor space that may conflict with production equipment. Fall protection is mandatory. OSHA compliance is scrutinized.
Our crews are certified for lift work and carry their own lift equipment on manufacturing jobs. We pre-walk every site to identify lift access constraints before bidding. A retrofit that looks simple on paper can be 2x the labor cost if we can't get lifts to half the fixtures.
3. Voltage matters
Commercial retail is almost always 208V or 277V. Manufacturing can be 208V, 277V, 480V, or even higher. Many industrial fixtures that were installed 20+ years ago are 480V systems — high voltage, dedicated circuits, specialized lamp holders.
480V LED systems cost approximately 40 percent more per fixture than 120/277V systems. The driver costs more. The circuit requirements are stricter. The install labor is more specialized.
Before bidding a manufacturing retrofit, we verify voltage across every fixture in the facility. A site with mixed voltage (common in older plants) needs a fixture strategy that accounts for both. Get this wrong and your project budget is off by 30-40 percent.
4. Surge protection is non-negotiable
Industrial environments are electrically noisy. Large motors cycle on and off. Welding equipment, VFDs, heavy machinery — all of it creates voltage spikes and transients that destroy LED drivers.
An LED driver that's perfectly fine in a retail environment will fail in 6-12 months in a manufacturing facility without surge protection. We've replaced fixtures we installed on previous jobs because the electrical environment was harsher than expected.
Standard practice on every manufacturing retrofit: branch circuit surge protection devices (SPDs) at every lighting panel, point-of-use SPDs at critical high-bay fixtures, and proper grounding throughout. An SPD costs $30 to $100 per circuit. It prevents $100-200 LED driver failures downstream. The math is obvious once you've seen a facility lose 30 drivers to a single lightning event.
What you actually save
Energy savings in manufacturing are typically larger than retail because the fixtures are larger and the burn hours are longer.
A metal halide high bay fixture replacing a typical production floor fixture draws 450-500 watts (lamp plus ballast). An equivalent LED high bay draws 150-200 watts. That's 60-70 percent energy reduction per fixture.
If the facility runs two or three shifts, the fixtures are on 5,000 to 8,000 hours per year. At $0.10 per kWh, that's $150 to $300 in energy savings per fixture per year.
Then there's maintenance. A 400W metal halide lamp failed roughly once every 18-24 months in a manufacturing environment. Replacing a high bay lamp requires a lift, two people, and a production gap. True cost of a single lamp replacement (lamp plus labor plus opportunity cost) ranges from $150 to $400 per event.
LED high bays rated for 50,000+ hours eliminate nearly all of that maintenance. For a facility with 200 high bay fixtures, eliminating 200 lamp changes per year at $200 average cost is $40,000 in annual maintenance savings alone.
Controls integration is where the big wins are
Most manufacturing facilities run lights at full output for the entire shift, even when sections of the floor are empty. Break rooms, bathroom corridors, lightly used areas — all fully lit all the time.
Proper controls integration with occupancy sensing and task tuning can reduce lighting energy by another 30-50 percent on top of the LED upgrade. The key is integration — controls that turn off individual fixtures or zones based on actual occupancy, not time-of-day schedules that miss the reality of shift work.
We typically specify wireless networked controls for manufacturing retrofits. Gateway-based systems let you program schedules, overrides, and maintenance alerts from a central interface. The incremental cost is $78 to $150 per fixture depending on the system, and it typically pays back in under 18 months.
The typical manufacturing retrofit economics
For a representative 100,000 SF manufacturing facility with 200 high bay fixtures plus exterior lighting:
Manufacturing retrofits consistently beat retail on payback because the savings are larger and the rebate programs are often more generous.
What to look for in a contractor
If you're evaluating contractors for a manufacturing LED retrofit:
Manufacturing retrofits reward careful planning and penalize corner-cutting. The economics are strong enough that it's worth paying slightly more for a contractor who gets the details right.