Walmart Canada announced a first-of-its-kind sales floor LED lighting retrofit, with all of the overhead sales floor lighting at its Brampton North (located at Highway 10 and Bovaird Road in Brampton, Ontario) 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 (kWh) per year, which will results 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."

Completed by Canadian EcoLight LED Systems Corp., the retrofit involved changing close to 6,000 lamps from traditional 25-watt fluorescent high efficiency lamps to 18-watt LED lights, allowing the retailer to reduce energy usage for store lighting by 28 per cent, thereby reducing the strain on the energy grid. In addition to the direct savings from switching to LED lamps, the retailer will also benefit from reduced costs for air conditioning requirements, relamping, reballasting and recycling, and an improved shopping environment.

Farrell said, "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."