Our Walmart updated their lighting a year or 2 ago, to T-8 altos.  I am finding a TON of them out now, a lot which have that blinking pink thing going on.  Also why does it seem places like this never relamp their fixtures?  I mean some of these have been out for quite some time, I guess it's just me but that bothers me to no end when a lamp isn't replaced promptly.

The WalMart of my city has also T8 altos, and they wait to have a big enough quantity of tube to replace (It's useless and expensive to call an electrician to replace only 1 tube...)

I see Walmart and Home Depot here in Western Canada, have started to turn off some of their lights (one in every third) in a row to save energy.

Darren: we have the same thing here! (PQ, Canada)

Hey Vince,It seems like they are doing that right across the country,hopefully we will see more 'rollback' pricing LOL.When you walk in on a bright and sunny day it seems so dim at first.It kinds looks like it's closing time when they have some of the lights turned off.

I see Walmart and Home Depot here in Western Canada, have started to turn off some of their lights (one in every third) in a row to save energy.


Darren: we have the same thing here! (PQ, Canada)

This seems to be a trend here too..

I have noticed recently that some stores in the UK are making energy saving cutbacks in their lighting, particularly Tesco. The other day I visited one of their big stores and noticed that the huge 6-tube T5HO fixtures had the two centre lamps removed and the spaces blanked out with metal plates, and also the display shelf lights (PL-L HO) were dimmed.

Also Sainsburys appear to be replacing all their T5HO display lighting with LED's which use less power but are much dimmer!

As for the 'Alto' lamps, they seem non - existent here. I have some Philips 'low mercury' CFL but no mention of the word Alto.

It might not be cost effective, but why can't they have their own maintenace staff replace the lamps instead of hiring someone in?

I've noticed a couple of the Walmarts here (one in Moss Bluff, LA and one in Leesville, LA) were built with skylights.  During the day, they shut off most, if not all the lights and just light the store with the skylights.

Ours does that in the grocery section, and the lights that are over there on are on a dimmer.  I always like seeing floruos dimmed.

A lot of them use a daylight harvesting strategy with photoelectric sensors throughout the stores (the ones with skylights).  These photocells are wired to a daylight controller and dim or shut off, depending on the FC threshold.

As for the outages, they may be waiting on warranty service.  Just this week, I went into a sight that we did a T5 replacement on.  I was honestly horrified at the number of lamp and ballast failures after 1.5 years.  One call to the warranty department took care of that, and we have another happy customer!

My good friend is head of the project along with Potts construction. They have redone all Wal-Marts, Home Depots and K-marts across the country!

Target is kinda starting to use GE lamps......My Target has F32T8 lamps mostly, and some T-5s for under the shelves also there are some older F96T12 HO Rapid start AND F96T12 regular single pin lamps in the back room, some single pin ones are kinda abandoned and "Dead" or dimmed while others works and while others are still in use.

Some rooms uses warmer colors while others are purposely using cooler colors.....

My Target was built around 1996-1997 and renovated to newer style in 2004....

Newer Target uses 2 lamp 4x2 instead of the older 4 lampers.....ours are still 4 lampers but some fixtures like in backroom hall and the front office inside has plastic diffusers and some got 2 lamps and some actually got 3 while others also have 4! Weird huh? One more thing I saw some fixtures under Pharmacy with 3 lamps....

wal mart seems to group re lamp which works better for dimming applications. the point is to keep "lighting uniformity" with lamps of the same age. I noticed the lamps rectify at high frequency when dimmed,when they increase in brightness the EOL protection must sense  the rectification. I really need to go there on a sunny day and take pics.

As long as I can remember, large stores such as Kmart do group re-lamping from contractors I believe. They usually have a certain schedule to re-lamp and unfortunately a lot of newer stuff is junk and massively fails before the next re-lamp schedule.

wal mart seems to group re lamp which works better for dimming applications. the point is to keep "lighting uniformity" with lamps of the same age. I noticed the lamps rectify at high frequency when dimmed,when they increase in brightness the EOL protection must sense  the rectification. I really need to go there on a sunny day and take pics.

Some lamps on some dimmers are rectifying when on low settling, while this phenomenon disappear on higher power levels.
It might have three reasons:
1) The lamp is close to EOL and when the cathode temperature is controlled mainly by the external power and not by the cathode fall dissipation (so on low power setting), the difference in emission might become significant.
2) The ballast is (by it's internal mismatch) on low setting not able to equally heat both cathodes or heat them not enough (so where the emission-temperature dependence is steep, so small temperature difference cause large emission difference)
3) It is very frequent practice to add a small DC current (resistor in parallel with one DC blocking capacitor) to the lamp, as it make the arc much more stable at low dimming levels. This might demonstrate on really low settings equally as lamp rectification (mercury migration).

Case 1) appears only on worn-out lamps and is not an issue.
Case 3) appear on all lamps, but only on very low settings (below 10%, usually at ~1..5%)
Case 2) is the only to worry about, as such ballast heavily damage electrodes at low setting...

Usually dimmable ballasts (with below 20..30% level dimming capability) need quite complex control schemes, so use dedicated controllers, with usually already build in EOL protections...