Walmart Canada completes sales floor LED lighting retrofit

Walmart Canada has become the first large Canadian retailer to retrofit its overhead sales floor lighting to LED.

A press release said the retailer has converted all of the overhead sales floor lighting at its Brampton North (located at Highway 10 and Bovaird Road in Brampton, Ont.) Supercentre from conventional fluorescent lighting to high efficiency LED 4-foot retrofit lamps.

The retailer estimates this small change could save approximately 283,000 kilo-watt hours per year, which will result in a savings of up to $26,000 per year.

"We're very proud to be the first large Canadian retailer to fully convert sales floor lighting to LED for general illumination requirements," said Ken Farrell, vice president of store development for Walmart Canada. "This latest project represents just one of many steps Walmart Canada is taking to make our stores less energy intensive."

The retrofit involved changing close to 6,000 lamps from traditional 25-watt fluorescent high efficiency lamps to 18-watt LED lights. The change will allow the retailer to reduce energy usage for store lighting by 28 per cent.

In addition, the retailer said it will also benefit from reduced costs for air conditioning requirements, relamping, reballasting and recycling, and an improved shopping environment.

"Unlike traditional fluorescent lights, LED lights emit less heat, which allows us to reduce our air condition use at the store during the spring and summer," said Farrell. "The new lights also provide a better shopping environment for our customers. Customers shopping at the Brampton North location will notice the store appears much brighter and with lighting that is closer to natural daylight, almost as if we'd installed skylights around the store."