How Facility Managers can reduce maintenance costs with LED Lighting

Besides ensuring the safety of all occupants on site, another hugely important aspect of a facility managers job is to reduce maintenance costs and maximise their budget wherever possible. If you are an FM, below is some advice that could help you effectively reduce maintenance costs for your premises.

The three approaches generally adopted by FM's are the following:

Reactive - Waiting until something no longer functions before taking appropriate action to fix the problem

Proactive - Monitoring and checking for any faults, taking appropriate action along the way

Predictive - Using technology to predict or forecast any possible issue before it becomes a threat to operations. E.g: Thermal imaging

The most common method taken by facility managers is usually the first of the three approaches mentioned, reactive, this is often thought to be the cheapest approach. However, this is rarely the case, unless the facility you are looking after is constantly running smoothly. Unfortunately, there will always be issues that pop up, therefore things rarely will run smoothly on a consistent basis.

How to proactively reduce maintenance costs

In many instances taking a more upfront, proactive approach with your building maintenance, can help you to achieve greater cost efficiency.

LED Lighting

In large buildings maintenance teams may be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with simple tasks, like the replacement of faulty lighting for example. This may well seem trivial, as it is "just lighting".

However, after time, the constant changing of under performing light bulbs can become an unnecessary financial burden. In one way, the time taken to replace faulty lighting can take vital time away from other more important maintenance tasks and in another, the costs can start to rack up if you are having to constantly supply new light bulbs in order to replace previous faulty ones.

A viable solution to helping significantly reduce energy costs, whilst also decreasing maintenance costs, is LED lighting, this type of lighting is said to last at least 50,000 to 100,00 hours without any decrease in output. This is 50 times longer than traditional incandescent lighting and up to 10 times longer than any other lighting technology. This is perhaps no wonder why LED Lighting is so popular and still growing in popularity.

LED lights are usually more expensive to install initially than other lighting, however, LED lighting very quickly pays for itself. With reduced energy consumption and wastage, much less frequency of replacement required, and huge long-term maintenance savings made.

Record and Monitor

Although we pinpointed and mentioned LED lighting earlier, recording and monitoring your maintenance costs is also a great method for helping identify many other avenues to maximise cost saving on maintenance.

There are many ways to save money on your budget related to your maintenance activities. One key element to this is to design a proper preventive maintenance plan, by doing so, over time you and your team will have a better understanding and be able to identify the specific opportunities to effectively save on your budget. Both short term and long term, in areas you were previously unaware of.

If you require any assistance with the installation, maintenance, replacement and repairing of your LED lighting from ourselves call us today - 01604 696113, we're happy to help.