From the breaker to the cleanroom ceiling: LED luminaires, circuit-level metering, remote switching, variable speed drives, FFU control, LED walls, face access and AI video — installed onto the DIN rail and cable tray that are already in the building, and landed on one platform. No rip-and-replace, no line stop, no six-month shutdown.
Metering and lighting are where a retrofit starts. They are not where it ends. The same plant has motors that still start at full torque, a room that has to hold a pressure differential, a gate that has to decide who comes through it, and a control room that has to show all of it at once. These five are the groups a retrofit quote usually leaves out, and they are here because our own projects kept buying them from three other suppliers and then paying an engineer to make them agree with each other. The full range is 36 groups and 266 models — the switchgear, the contactors, the sensors and the cable glands that a retrofit actually consumes.
A 21.5 in portrait panel PC for a fourteen-station mimic, and a 10 in panel that polls the drives on its own machine without asking the plant network for permission.
1080 × 1920 · IP66 front · UL 508A 02 / LED DisplaysP2.5 indoor and P4 outdoor cabinets, and the wall processor that most budgets forget — the line that cuts one 4K source into eight frame-locked slices.
1,000–6,500 nits · 3,840 Hz · front service 03 / CleanroomH14 fan filter units on a group controller holding Δp, particle counting that writes the ISO 14644-1 report, and the 5 Pa alarm band nobody can read off a wall gauge.
ISO 5–8 · ±1.25 Pa · 64 FFUs per loop 04 / Motor ControlDrives, soft starters and protection relays — and the motor lead length, dv/dt filter and rewind risk stated in the quotation rather than discovered at commissioning.
22–45 kW · STO SIL 2 · UL 61800-5-1 05 / Access & Face IDFace terminals that match on the device and keep no images, controllers that hold anti-passback locally, and a speed gate whose fail mode is agreed with the fire authority before manufacture.
OSDP v2 · UL 294 · no image retentionNot because they were hard to build. Because a regulator closed them. On 28 July 2026 grid-tied inverters and mobile robots went onto the FCC covered list — by country of production rather than by company name, which is the part that catches people out. A supplier who is still pricing either of those for you is either working from an old price list or hoping you will not ask.
The remaining closed categories, the four approval gates that decide all of this, and the exact words we use about origin are on the compliance page. It is the least commercial page on this site and the one we would want read first.
Lighting is the only part of a retrofit that usually clears its own cost inside a year, because the waste is in the fixture rather than in the process. The arithmetic below is per fitting at 4,000 operating hours — a single-shift plant. A three-shift plant multiplies every row by three.
| Existing | Actual draw | Replacement | Saved / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 400 W metal halide high bay | ≈ 440 W with ballast | UFO High Bay 150 W | 1,160 kWh |
| 2 × 36 W T8 fluorescent | ≈ 90 W with ballast | 2 × T8 LED 18 W | 216 kWh |
| 250 W HPS high bay | ≈ 285 W with ballast | UFO High Bay 100 W | 740 kWh |
| 150 W HPS wall pack | ≈ 175 W with ballast | Floodlight 60 W | 460 kWh |
At 4,000 h and $0.11 / kWh, the first row is about $128 a year against a $128 fitting — before utility rebates, and before the dimming saving, which is the larger number on a warehouse with daylight. Nothing here is a modelled figure: it is watts at the board multiplied by hours, and it is the calculation a plant engineer will redo on the back of the quotation.
Every other vendor quotes a weekend line stop. On a plant running three shifts with a customer penalty clause, that is not a scheduling problem — it is a veto. So the work has to happen on live circuits, in the gaps between shifts, or not at all.
Split-core CTs clamp over an existing conductor. The three-pole breaker replaces a breaker in the same slot and the same enclosure. No feeder is isolated, no cable is cut, and the only tool the electrician needs that they do not already own is a laptop.
A plant built in stages has a 1998 BACnet controller next to a 2023 Modbus meter next to something with a serial port and no documentation. Nine out of ten delays are here, not in the hardware — which is why the protocol audit happens before the quote, not after.
Every protocol is normalised into the same tag tree: site, building, panel, circuit, point. It is unglamorous and it is the entire difference between a dashboard that survives year two and forty point-to-point integrations that nobody can maintain.
Two to four weeks of metered baseline before anything is switched. Without it, a savings figure is a claim; with it, it is a measurement both sides can audit — and the number a lender will actually accept when the project is financed against the savings.
An alarm at three in the morning on a Sunday is the only test of an installation that matters. Contracted sites get a named engineer and a response time in the contract, not a ticket queue and an autoresponder.
Deal registration, project pricing from a single site, and a named application engineer for every registered opportunity. Approval is one business day with a valid electrical contractor licence or an existing systems-integration business.
Apply as a partnerOne photo of a distribution board and a line count is enough for a first conversation. We come back within two business days with a point count, a protocol risk list and a budget range at ±20%.