How to Increase the Lifespan of Your LED Screen with Regular Servicing?
LED displays might seem like they will work perennially. But, from the moment you turn the screens on, the countdown begins. Every single LED screen you invest in will someday go blank. Our goal as industry practitioners is to arrest this process and ensure that the usable life of your LED screens is as long as possible. But before we get to that, it is essential to understand the economics of the functional life of your LED screens.
The Economics of LED Displays and Their Usable Life
The economics of an LED display focuses on every factor that will affect its cost of ownership. As the cost of ownership goes up alongside inflation, your profits attributable to each LED screen are plunging.
The average usable life of an LED screen, the one used in your TV, is approximately 40,000 hours. If you plan to run this screen 24 x 7, you can expect the screen to last for about 4.5 years. The numbers presented here assume that the screen is installed in an ideal state where weather conditions, dust, and vandalism do not affect the screen. Hence, the real usable life of your LED displays would be lesser than the 4.5-year mark.
2. Changing Power Consumption Patterns
LED screens tend to have power consumption rising in a step function. From the baseline year, the screens will start consuming more power every year. This is primarily driven by the daily active hours on each LED screen, build quality, and consistency of power supply.
3. Performance Consistency
If you are monetizing each screen, you have an inventory of views. And if the screen goes off – your inventory is depleting. The LED displays will not suddenly go off, and instead, you will witness one panel going off unexpectedly and then another. Most LED screens are not equipped with redundancy capabilities to keep the screen functional even if the panel goes off. And hence, every outage or second of downtime is equal to lost revenue.
4. Annual Maintenance Overhead/Cost of the LED Screen
Finally, the most onerous overhead is the actual maintenance cost for the LED screen. Most manufacturers in India do not offer expert-led scheduled maintenance services. Instead, they offer services backed by third-party contractors. While these contractors often have the basic tools and skills, they are not product owners. They might not have access to the necessary performance and engineering data required to perform ground-up maintenance.
Such maintenance can do the job in the short run. But it does not help in extending the usable life of the LED.
How to Extend the Usable Life of Your LED Displays?
The average usable life of a conventional LED screen is less than half-a-decade. But, if you want to augment the ROI and value extracted from the LED investments, here are a few tactics and strategies that can set you up.
1. Control the Exposure to Moisture
Moisture or condensation has a multi-level impact on your screen. It:
1. Blurs the image output and renders the LED wall ineffective.
2. If the water gets through, it can result in corrosion and shorten the screen’s usable life.
3. It adds up maintenance costs as the excess moisture has to be cleaned out frequently.
To control the exposure to moisture, you must focus on these critical factors:
1. Location of the Screen: A more manageable way would be to install the LEDs in a shaded spot where direct rainfall and moisture do not impact the screen's output. However, such sites have a trade-off between location security and the footfall around the screen.
2. Diagnostics & Repair: A specific humidity level is permissible, and most well-engineered LED screens are designed to handle a certain threshold of moisture. For such screens, the best way to extend the usable life of the screen is to have some form of live diagnostics readily available to your operations team. The lesser the time to repair is, the lesser damage the excess moisture can cause to the mechanics of your LED displays.
3. Weather-Proofing the LED: You can seek some third-party water-proofing solutions. Much like the location-based solution, this will come with the trade-off of visibility. Anything that has to be added on top of your LED display unit will result in sub-optimal picture quality. However, it can still safeguard your screen on days of excess humidity or heavy rainfall.
2. Frequent Cleaning Schedule
Video wall servicing is not an additional service. It should be marked as an essential service to sustain the performance of your LED display unit and to extend its usable life.
To the untrained eye, cleaning should be an easy process. But when the screen is installed at a certain height or has complex engineering, you need professionals to take care of the process. The cleaning process must go well beyond the surface and fine-tune the screen's inner parts, circuits, and power cords. These backend areas often get neglected and result in quick depletion of equipment.
Generally, the best services are provided by manufacturers or manufacturer-recognized technicians who have the technical drawings, manuals, and instructions for cleaning a specific LED display model.
3. Consistent Power Supply
A consistent power supply is a counterintuitive solution, and for most media operators, this might sound like a constraint. But consistent power supply, in line with your LED screen's requirements, is central to get consistent performance throughout the screen's usable life.
Whenever there is an unexpected outage, your LED display's computing system and electronic components are running the risk of overheating – when the power supply is suddenly resumed. While installing your LED screens, your manufacturer must provide a prescribed range of power supply where the screen runs at optimal performance.
Depending on your specific use-case of excess or less power supply, you can use inverters and transformers to balance the circuits and safeguard your LED displays.
Every second of uptime for your screens might translate into more revenues. After all, every single second of an active screen theoretically means an increased probability of your target audience catching up with the visuals. However, this correlation breaks down at a certain threshold.
While LED screens can be used around the clock, the electronic devices and computing the systems running the screens require downtime. This saves the system from overheating and also gives you visibility in your schedule to arrange for maintenance. Ideally, you should focus on at least two hours of scheduled downtime in a working week.
5. Protect the Supporting Devices
The screen itself is the most prominent component of the system. And hence, it is easy to fall into a fallacy and safeguard just the screen. But the processing and computing systems that support the LEDs are equally important.
In an ideal setup, such systems should be locked and isolated in close proximity to the screen. Some advanced LEDs support wireless connectivity that eliminates the very need for computing systems and their safeguarding. Usually, given the cost of maintenance and protecting the additional equipment, investing in LED displays that offer remote control makes sense.
6. Bring the MTTR to 24 Hours or Lesser for LED Wall in India
MTTR, or Mean Time to Respond, is a popular metric used in the information technology industry. It is the average response time your team needs to resolve a critical issue. For LEDs, this can often stretch to days and weeks, which exacerbates the problems at hand. As an operational metric, you should focus on bringing this down to 24 hours or less. To get this degree of efficiency, you will need a team of professionals available around the clock to detect and respond to the LED's lagging performance.
LED Displays: The XTREME Difference
We understand that incorporating all the strategies in an LED placement to video wall servicing is not feasible for business owners. And that is why we have engineered each of these strategies into the XTREME Media portfolio of offerings.
1. Vigilant IoT Monitoring Technology
The IoT environment enables our team of operators and specialists to monitor the performance of every LED panel in real-time. This way, every single outage or anomaly is reported and addressed without fail.
2. 24 x 7 Support Services
Our team of specialists is available around the clock. So, along with the detected data, you will have a team of experts at your disposal to resolve issues as quickly as they occur.
Our precision engineering, design, and manufacturing capabilities on one platform enable us to deliver the industry-leading promise of a seven-year warranty – which is 55% more than the conventional LED screen.
4. In-House Servicing Capabilities
Our in-house team of service professionals understand each product configuration ground-up and have capabilities to the extent of replacing and servicing the chips.
5. Tested for Indian Conditions
Indian climate and road conditions demand specific grades of testing and robust build quality. Over the years, we have built manufacturing, assembly, installation, and maintenance processes that ensure each LED display unit performs optimally to the Indian conditions and the XTREME Media standard of quality.
