Maintenance savings stem from the following
1) Cost of time to report light outage
2) Cost of material for repairing nonfunctional lights
3) Labor costs for the replacement of bulbs/ ballast/ striker etc.
Maintaining outdoor lighting is usually more expensive primarily because each visit needs a team of workers equipped with tall ladders or cherry pickers and U haul trucks. In the case of streetlights the team must contend with traffic and choose an off peak time for repairs.
The city of Ann Arbor estimated the cost labor and equipment for each maintenance visit to be $211. They estimated this cost for ten foot high lights. The cost for higher streetlights and car parking lights and high bays can be reasonably be expected to be similar. For typical office lights the cost would be close to $ 50.
Once the bill of materials and the relevant labor charges are in place a simple spread sheet reveals the potential maintenance savings with LED technology.
1) The table looks at only the maintenance savings of Led lights and it does not include savings from energy efficiency, reduced airconditioning bills or disposal costs for mercury containing lighting products.
2) Unlike Fluorescent tubes LEDs are scalable. Thus a single LED device can replace a 46 tube high bay fixture. In such cases the maintenance costs of a single high bay fixture will be 36 times that of a single fluorescent tube and the gains from using LED technology will be even more significant.
