Commercial lighting designed to a number, not to a feeling.
LED lighting, upgrades and controls for offices, warehouses, retail and industrial premises across Scotland, from Aberdeen and Peterhead. Designed against BS EN 12464-1, installed and certified, with the payback worked out before you commit.
Steven Watt holds City & Guilds 2391-52 inspection and testing, 2382-22 BS 7671, 2365-03 installations and 2921-34 EV charging. Registered in Scotland SC821028.
Commercial lighting is a design job before it is an installation job. The right answer for a space is a light level, a glare rating and a colour quality that suit the task being done in it, and those are all published numbers rather than matters of opinion. Faithful Spark Electricians is a NICEIC Approved Contractor, enrolment 620239, TrustMark 4205123, registered in Scotland as SC821028 and insured to £2M.
This page is written for Scotland and we work from Aberdeen and Peterhead across the north east. It covers commercial and industrial premises. If you are a homeowner, our LED lighting installation page is written for houses, and outdoor and security lighting has its own page.
Most lighting pages tell you LEDs save energy and last longer. True, and not useful. This one gives you the light levels your spaces should be hitting, the two quality numbers that decide whether people can actually work under the result, what the fluorescent phase out does and does not mean, and how a payback calculation is put together so you can check ours.
Fluorescent tubes are no longer being made. Your fittings are not illegal.
This is the most misrepresented fact in commercial lighting right now, and it gets used to sell upgrades nobody needs yet. Here is the accurate version.
What that does not mean
It is a supply restriction, not an operational ban. Nobody is required to rip out working fluorescent fittings, and existing supplier stock can still legally be sold and used. If a contractor tells you your lighting is now illegal, that is a sales line rather than the law.
What it does mean is practical rather than legal. Stock cannot be replenished once it runs down, so replacement tubes get scarcer and dearer, and at some point a failed fitting in a run of twenty becomes a fitting you cannot match. That is the real trigger for planning a change, and it is a budgeting question rather than an emergency.
Two things worth knowing when you do replace them. Fluorescent tubes contain mercury, so they are hazardous waste and go through a licensed WEEE route rather than a skip, and the disposal is the installer's job to arrange and evidence. And an LED tube dropped into an existing fluorescent fitting is not automatically a compliant installation: the control gear usually has to be removed or bypassed and the fitting relabelled, which is electrical work, not a lamp change.
How bright should your premises actually be?
BS EN 12464-1 sets maintained illuminance for indoor work places by task, not by room name. These are the figures we design to, and they are the reason a warehouse and an office need completely different schemes even in the same building.
| Space | Lux | Max glare (UGR) | What drives it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offices, screen work, meeting rooms | 500 | 19 | Reading and sustained screen work. The glare limit matters as much as the lux here. |
| Retail sales floors | 500 | 19 to 22 | Merchandise needs to be seen properly, and colour quality matters more than in an office. |
| Reception and front of house | 300 to 500 | 22 | Part task, part first impression. Usually the space clients judge you on. |
| Warehouse racking and general storage | 150 | 25 | Movement and locating stock. Rougher work tolerates more glare. |
| Picking and packing zones | 300 | 22 | Reading labels and checking items. Commonly under lit because it sits in a warehouse. |
| Corridors and circulation | 100 | 25 to 28 | Getting from one place to another safely. Over lighting corridors is the most common waste we find. |
| Stairs and level changes | 100 to 150 | 25 | Treads have to read clearly. This is a safety level, not a comfort one. |
| Washrooms and welfare | 200 | 25 | General use. Mirrors need their own treatment rather than more ceiling light. |
Two words in that table do a lot of work. Maintained means the level the scheme still delivers at the end of its life, after lumen depreciation and dirt, not the level it hits on day one. A scheme designed to exactly 500 lux when new is a scheme that fails the standard within a couple of years. And these are task area figures, so the number applies where the work happens rather than as an average across the floor. A survey measures what you actually have before anybody proposes what you should have.
Want to know what your premises actually measures?
We survey and measure the levels you have now against BS EN 12464-1, free, before anyone proposes spending anything.
The four numbers that decide whether people can work under it
Light level is the easy part and the only part most quotes mention. These are the ones that separate a scheme people are comfortable in from one they complain about within a fortnight.
Unified Glare Rating
A measure of how much a fitting glares in a given room. For offices and any screen based work the limit is UGR 19 or lower. Rougher industrial work tolerates up to 25.
Cheap high output panels frequently exceed it. The room gets brighter, people get headaches, and nobody connects the two.
Colour rendering
How faithfully colours appear. Most work places need Ra 80 or better. Retail, food and anywhere colour is part of the product usually wants Ra 90.
This is the number that makes stock look grey, paint look wrong and produce look old.
Uniformity
The ratio of the lowest light level to the average across the task area, normally at least 0.6. Bright pools with dark gaps between them fail this even when the average looks right on paper.
It is the usual symptom of too few fittings chosen to hit an average.
Flicker and stroboscopic effect
Poor LED drivers flicker at a rate you cannot consciously see but can feel. It is linked to eye strain and headaches, and around moving machinery the stroboscopic effect can make rotating parts look stationary.
Driver quality, not lamp quality, decides this. It is a real reason not to buy the cheapest fitting.
Colour temperature
Roughly 3000K for warm and welcoming, 4000K as the usual neutral for offices and general commercial work, 5000K and above for high detail industrial tasks.
Mixing temperatures across one open space is the fastest way to make a new installation look wrong.
Ingress protection
A fitting in a wash down area, an unheated store or an external position needs an IP rating chosen for that environment, not the office one repeated throughout the building.
Under rated fittings in wet or dusty areas fail from the inside and take the warranty with them.
What changes from one kind of building to the next
The standard gives the target. The building decides how you hit it, and the mistakes are different in each.
Offices
500 lux at the desk with UGR at or below 19, and controls that stop you paying to light an empty floor. The two common faults are glare from panels chosen on price, and corridors lit to the same level as the workstations.
Warehouses and industrial units
Mounting height drives everything. High bay fittings need a beam angle matched to the height and the racking layout, because light that lands on the top of a rack is light you paid for and cannot use. Aisle lighting has to run along the aisles rather than across them.
Retail
Colour rendering earns its keep here. Ra 90 on merchandise, accent lighting that is genuinely accent rather than more of the same, and a shopfront that still reads at four in the afternoon in December.
Hospitality and licensed premises
Warmer temperatures, dimming that actually dims smoothly at the bottom of the range, and back of house kitchens that need a completely different scheme from the room next door. Licensing conditions often set their own requirements.
Food processing and wash down
IP rated throughout, sealed and cleanable, and specified to survive being hosed rather than merely splashed. This is where an under rated fitting fails fastest.
External, yards and car parks
Column positions, spill onto neighbours and dark half of the year in the north east. Covered in more detail on our outdoor lighting page.
Emergency lighting is a separate system with its own rules. A lighting upgrade almost always disturbs it, because moving or changing fittings changes the escape route coverage that was designed around the old ones. We reassess it as part of any scheme rather than leaving you with a valid certificate describing a building that no longer exists. The testing duty and the detail sit on our commercial maintenance page.
Controls, or how to stop lighting an empty building
Swapping a fitting reduces the watts it draws. Controls reduce the hours it draws them for. The second one is usually the bigger number and it is almost never in a competing quote.
Presence and absence detection
Presence switches on when someone arrives and off when they leave. Absence requires a person to switch on manually and only handles the switching off. Absence saves more, because it stops lights coming on in a room somebody walked through.
Store rooms, washrooms, plant rooms and meeting rooms are where this pays for itself quickest.
Daylight dimming
Fittings near windows dim as daylight rises. On a perimeter office row in a building with decent glazing this runs for a large part of the working day, and the occupants do not notice it happening.
It needs the fittings zoned by their distance from the glazing, which is a design decision taken before installation.
Zoning and scene setting
Splitting a floor so a late worker is not lighting the whole open plan, and setting levels for cleaning and out of hours. Simple, cheap at first fix and expensive to retrofit afterwards.
Addressable systems
DALI and similar let each fitting be addressed individually, regrouped without rewiring, and report faults. Worth it on a larger floor plate or where the layout will change; over specified on a small unit that will not.
We will tell you which of those you are, including when the answer is that you do not need it.
Time control
The oldest trick and still effective on external, signage and display lighting. Often already installed and set wrong, or set correctly years ago for a building that has since changed its hours.
Where controls go wrong
Sensors in the wrong place, time outs set too short so lights drop while people are still working, and a commissioning setup nobody documented. All three end with someone taping over the sensor, which removes the entire saving.
How a lighting payback is actually calculated
Not one competing page we looked at shows the arithmetic. It is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope, and once you have seen it you can hold any quote to it, ours included.
Worked example: forty twin fluorescent fittings in a small warehouse
Illustrative only. Every figure below is an assumption you should replace with your own.
What this deliberately leaves out. Maintenance savings, which are real but harder to pin down: no more tubes, starters or failed ballasts, and no more access equipment to change them at height. Controls, which on a space that is not occupied all day can save more than the fitting swap did. And it ignores the fact that a scheme designed properly may use fewer fittings than the one it replaces, which changes both columns. The rate per kWh is the figure that moves the answer most, so any payback quoted without telling you which rate it assumed is not a payback, it is a number.
On our pricing. Lighting schemes are quoted after a survey, because the fitting count depends on the target level, the ceiling height and what is already there. We do the payback on your rates and your hours and show you the arithmetic, and if the answer is that the job does not pay back within a sensible horizon we will say so. The only two figures we publish are a small commercial EICR from £300 + VAT and a workplace EV charger from £800 + VAT, because those are the two we can state without seeing the building.
We will run these numbers on your building
Free lighting survey and a payback worked on your own kWh rate and your own hours, with a fixed price quote. Not an estimate off a web page.
Commercial lighting across the north east of Scotland
We run lighting work from Aberdeen and Peterhead. Larger schemes get phased so the premises keeps trading.
Every claim here has a number behind it
A lighting scheme ends in a certificate somebody else will rely on. Each of these is on a public register.
Commercial lighting questions we get asked
If yours is not here, call 07304 027013 and ask it.
Are fluorescent tubes banned? Do we have to replace our fittings?
No, you do not have to replace anything. Since 1 February 2024 new T5, T8 and compact fluorescent lamps cannot be placed on the GB market under UK RoHS, because they are inefficient and contain mercury. That is a restriction on supply, not on use. Existing stock can still be sold and used, and installed fittings are perfectly legal to keep running. The practical issue is that stock cannot be replenished, so replacement tubes get scarcer and more expensive over time. Treat it as a budgeting trigger rather than an emergency, and be wary of anyone telling you your lighting is now illegal.
Can we just put LED tubes into our existing fluorescent fittings?
Sometimes, but it is electrical work rather than a lamp change. The existing control gear normally has to be removed or bypassed, the fitting has to be relabelled to show what it now contains, and the result has to be safe for the next person who opens it. A retrofit tube dropped in alongside live ballast is a hazard for whoever works on it later. It is also worth checking whether the old fitting is worth keeping at all, because its reflector and diffuser are often the reason the space was dim in the first place.
How bright should an office be?
BS EN 12464-1 puts most office and screen based work at 500 lux maintained on the task area, with glare at UGR 19 or lower and colour rendering of at least Ra 80. Maintained means the level the scheme still gives at the end of its life rather than on the day it is switched on, and task area means where the work happens rather than an average across the room. Corridors by contrast only need around 100 lux, which is why lighting them to office levels is such a common and expensive mistake.
What is UGR and why does it matter more than brightness?
Unified Glare Rating measures how much a fitting glares in a specific room. For offices and screen work the limit is UGR 19 or lower. It matters because glare is the complaint people actually make, though they rarely describe it that way: they say the new lights give them headaches, or they turn half of them off. A scheme can hit its lux target perfectly and still be unusable if the fittings glare, and cheap high output panels are the usual culprit.
How long is the payback on an LED upgrade?
Commonly three to five years on a fluorescent replacement in a building with long running hours, but the honest answer is that it depends almost entirely on your electricity rate and your hours. There is a full worked example above showing exactly how the calculation is put together. Ask any contractor which rate per kWh and how many annual hours their payback assumed. If they cannot tell you, the figure was not calculated.
What happens to the old fluorescent tubes?
They contain mercury, so they are hazardous waste and have to go through a licensed WEEE disposal route rather than into a skip. Arranging and evidencing that is part of the job and should be in your quote. Ask to see where they went, because the duty of care sits with you as the waste producer, not only with the contractor who carried them out of the building.
Will a lighting upgrade affect our emergency lighting?
Almost always, yes. Emergency lighting is designed around the escape route and around the fittings that were there when it was commissioned, so moving, removing or changing fittings can leave the escape route short of coverage while the certificate still says otherwise. We reassess it as part of any scheme. The ongoing monthly and annual testing duty is covered on our commercial electrical maintenance page.
Does Part P apply to commercial lighting work in Scotland?
No. Part P is an England and Wales building regulation and has never applied in Scotland. Electrical work here sits under the Scottish building standards, and notifiable work goes through a building warrant from the local council rather than a Building Control notification. A lighting replacement on a like for like basis does not normally require a warrant, but structural or escape route alterations that come with a wider refit can.
Tell us the space and what happens in it
Call Steven on 07304 027013. The useful details are the type of premises, roughly how many fittings, the ceiling height and your trading hours. We survey, measure what you actually have, and come back with a scheme and the payback arithmetic on your own numbers.
Faithful Spark Electricians, 17 Thomson Road, Peterhead, AB42 3FJ. Registered in Scotland SC821028. NICEIC Approved Contractor 620239. TrustMark 4205123. OZEV EVHS/WCS14254. Light levels quoted are indicative values from BS EN 12464-1:2021 and the standard itself is the authority. The payback example is illustrative and uses stated assumptions. Prices exclude VAT and were correct at September 2026.