I don't think I'd go with T5 fixtures as their running costs don't make sense for this application. In the back warehouse some T5 highways on motion detectors or something might work well but for the store front I think T8 LED or straight LED panel are more efficient and would cut power usage by 70% or more. That's rather huge. Their current usage for lighting is about 14,000W. Using T8 LED you'd be around 4000W. In a place that has 2 ceiling fans and no AC the employees would love to get rid of an extra 10,000W and I'm sure that the ones paying the electrical bill would love to save that on their yearly bill too.
The worst part about the BX is that it's such a complete mess that I can't tell you if there's stuff abandoned up there or anything aside from that it's a disaster. I mean it's safe in that it's been like that for a long time as hasn't caused a fire but it's dangerous in that it's such a mess that even if something was painfully wrong it's hidden which basically means it's really not safe.
This sadly seems to often be the dilemma tho this one is worse than most. It's very bad but how do you fix it? How far do you go? Just the lighting alone I'd ballpark at 25-30k. That's replacement. But replacing is going to uncover issues and ideally it would be far easier to do with a scissor lift. So where do you draw the line? I can tell you that just fixing the lights isn't a simple fix as these fixtures are all very old, very dirty, and require a full rewire which makes replacement more cost effective.
You could save some money going with standard lamps but long term that costs you money as they cost double to run every year and that means after about 15 months your savings is now an expense as you pay for the added hydro.
Then you have the service which currently doubles as light switches. I didn't count on site but it seems that there's about 20 circuits doing lighting. That's nearly twice as many as there needs to be with the current load on 15A circuits and much more than twice the load using 20A circuits. Again what is going on? Abandoning this mess and starting over could free up much needed space in the panel and we could even put them into a contactor with some switches or maybe something fancier. But that's more cost upfront. The manager has said the breakers are being changed out every couple of years. I don't know how much an FPE bolt-on breaker costs but some switches and a contactor will last for years and will be cheaper to replace then discontinued breakers should that ever be the case.
There needs to be a balance between cost and stuff being redone. If cost is the only standard and we're trying to keep it as low as possible then this is what you end up with and the work needed now has snowballed. Had the fixtures been replaced with T8 stuff 8 years ago maybe the fixtures would be reusable and you could get away with relamping to LED. That doesn't deal with the lack of switches or the mess of wire but at least it would look okay.
I think I've rambled on long enough now.
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