In January 2017 we released CIRC270, a round LED board that drops into an existing bulkhead fitting and turns it into an LED luminaire with three hours of emergency backup. The housing, diffuser and fixings stay where they are; only the light source and gear inside change.
Why retrofit a bulkhead
Bulkheads sit in stairwells, plant rooms, car parks and corridors, often on escape routes, and there are a lot of them. Replacing every fitting means new fixings, making good and a fresh round of emergency testing. Swapping only the internals keeps the sealed housing that is already on the wall and gets the efficiency gain of LED without the disruption.
What was in the kit
- The board. A 270 mm circular aluminium PCB carrying 2835 mid-power LEDs. The board marking reads 11S9P, which is 99 LEDs in nine parallel strings of eleven.
- The driver. A Helvar LED driver.
- Emergency. An Eaton emergency kit giving three hours of operation on mains failure.
Because the aluminium board spreads heat on its own, it needed no extra heatsink and was rated to work at 45 °C ambient, which matters in a sealed fitting in a Dubai plant room. Keyhole slots and several fixing holes around the edge let it mount in bulkheads of different shapes and fixing patterns.
Retrofits today
We still build LED boards to suit existing fittings. Our current range for this is the RETRO retrofit kit family: modules made to fit the existing luminaire, in fixed or tunable white, with DALI, 1-10 V or on-off control and emergency or sensor options where the job needs them.
If you have a stock of old fittings to convert, send us a photo and the dimensions, and see our services for how we handle custom modules.