Commercial Lighting Solutions Florida

Technical reference for lighting retrofits, parking lot installation, LED conversions, and specialty commercial illumination.

Commercial lighting has been through a complete technology turnover in the last decade. Metal halide, high-pressure sodium, and T8 fluorescent installations that dominated commercial facilities through 2015 are now the exception. LED has won on every technical axis that matters—color rendering, lifespan, dimming response, total cost of ownership—and utility incentive structures have kept pace. Florida Power & Light and JEA both offer commercial lighting rebates that meaningfully shift ROI calculations, though program terms change year to year and pre-approval is required for most rebate categories.

Parking lot lighting is where the biggest savings and the biggest liability risks converge. A typical big-box retail parking lot running 400W metal halide fixtures on dawn-to-dusk photocells burns roughly 2,000 watt-hours per fixture per night. Converting to 150W LED fixtures with the same light output drops that to 750 watt-hours—a 62% cut in energy before any dimming or occupancy control is added. Factor in the maintenance savings from not replacing HID lamps every two to three years, and payback on parking lot conversions usually lands between 18 and 36 months. The liability side: IESNA RP-20 recommends minimum maintained foot-candles for parking areas, and falls under insufficient lighting are a real exposure.

Interior retrofits involve more nuance. Office spaces want 3500K-4000K color temperature for general areas and sometimes 3000K in executive or hospitality zones. Retail spaces benefit from higher color rendering index (CRI 90+) to make merchandise look correct. Warehouse and industrial spaces tolerate cooler temperatures (5000K) and benefit from high-bay LED fixtures with integrated motion sensing that can cut aisle lighting to 10% when unoccupied. The installation cost of a retrofit varies by whether the existing ballasts can be bypassed (fastest) or must be removed entirely (more thorough but slower).

Sports lighting, hotel exterior lighting, and specialty illumination represent the high end of commercial lighting work. Sports-grade LED fixtures from manufacturers like Musco or Ephesus are capable of instant-on full brightness (metal halide could take 15 minutes to warm up) and precise aim control that significantly reduces light trespass onto neighboring properties. The spec and installation work for these systems is not comparable to office retrofit work and should be scoped separately. Hospitality exterior lighting increasingly combines color-tunable fixtures with DMX control for programmable scenes—a more complex install than a standard dawn-to-dusk pack, but valuable for branding.

For facility managers planning a multi-building lighting program, the sequencing matters. Audit existing fixtures, map circuit loading, verify panel headroom, check rebate eligibility, then spec. Jumping straight to product selection without the load and rebate work is how projects run over budget. The resources below cover commercial lighting installation, retrofit, and specialty applications across Northeast Florida.