Phoster Industries, one of North America’s leading designers and manufacturers of energy efficient, LED lights has completed a significant eco-friendly LED lighting retrofit at Place Ville Marie, Montreal’s most well known and prestigious commercial/retail property.

Phoster Industries replaced every one of the 436 350-500 watt incandescent light fixtures in the lobby (the same fixtures originally installed when the building opened in 1961), with 436 52 watt PAR 64 LED lighting retrofit kits. To make this project come to fruition, Phoster Industries worked in collaboration with The SITQ ( Société Immobilière Trans-Quebéc), the real estate arm of the government of the Province of Quebec and owners and managers of PVM, Axxima, the energy and maintenance management company responsible for PVM , and the government owned utility, Hydro-Quebec. The Phoster LED solution allowed for a savings of 1.5 million kilowatts per year towards which Hydro-Quebec subsidized $0.15 cents/kilowatt as part of their Commercial Rebate Program totaling $225,000 and covering 60% of the cost of the Phoster LED lights.

The Phoster Industries LED retrofits have been operating for 24 hours a day since September 2009. In addition to the dramatic near 90% energy savings, the Phoster Industries LED solution has eliminated any maintenance concerns associated with the lights, a “hot button” issue for the customer as the ceiling height in the PVM lobby is over 50 ft high, making light bulb changes difficult, time consuming, and expensive to accomplish in the past. Phoster’s LED solution runs at just 75° Celsius (167° Faranheight ) as opposed to the intensely hot incandescent lights which ran at 270° Celsius / (518° Faranheight), thus considerably reducing the HVAC usage and generating vast savings in electricity costs nearing the total dollars saved on the light wattage reduction.

Phoster Industries is amongst the first and most successful LED product development companies in North America providing quick turn-around product design, development and manufacturing services to an account base of fortune 500 national brand retailers, real estate trusts and the lighting specifying community. Phoster Industries is one of the few LED Lighting companies who has real life “in the field installations” now running for 30,000 to more than 50,000 hours, a considerable achievement in the relatively young world of LED lighting.