I quote and specify commercial lighting orders for an electrical distributor in the Pacific Northwest. Seven years in, I’ve personally made—and documented—three significant quoting mistakes, totaling roughly $4,800 in wasted budget. Give or take a few hundred. The worst one happened in September 2022, on a warehouse lighting package that looked completely ordinary from the outside. This is that story—and the exit sign specification guide I wish I’d had that morning.
The order that should have been routine
Mike, a contractor I’d worked with since 2018, called on a Monday morning. He had landed the tenant-improvement lighting package at a distribution warehouse in Kent, Washington. On the surface it was the kind of job I quote every week: new high bays for the storage floor, a modest office build-out along the front wall, and the exit signs that always seem to be an afterthought until an inspector asks about them.
The material list was 48 high bay fixtures, 9 Kenall ceiling light fixtures for the offices, and 47 exit signs. The tenant’s move-in date was fixed, which meant the delivery date was fixed too. I priced the high bays from the high bay section of the warehouse lighting catalog, and I pulled the Kenall ceiling light model from the same spec we had used on a similar job a year earlier. Then I hit the exit sign line.
I typed the part number I always typed. I didn’t check the mounting type. I didn’t open the egress drawings. We didn’t have a formal verification process for exit sign quotes back then, and honestly, I thought I didn’t need one. Exit signs were the easy part. That’s what I told myself right up until they weren’t.
The ceiling plan I didn’t fully read
Mike sent a reflected ceiling plan. I opened it. I counted the high bays, confirmed the office fixtures, and saved the PDF into the project folder. What I didn’t do was look closely at how the 47 exit signs were distributed through the building.
Thirty-five were straightforward. They hung on walls above exit doors, where a single visible face is all the code requires. The other twelve were different. They were shown on the ceiling, spaced along the main warehouse aisles, in positions where a sign has to be readable from more than one direction. That means a double-face fixture—a housing that shows the exit legend on both sides.
I never made that distinction. Every sign on the order went out as the single-face style I’d memorized years earlier. The label was on the product page. I just never looked at the page.
The inspector caught it, not me
The fixtures arrived on schedule, and the electrical crew installed all 47 signs in a day and a half. They did clean work. Nobody on our side asked the question that mattered.
The electrical inspector did, about a week later. “What does that sign say when you approach from the other side?” she asked Mike, pointing up at one of the twelve ceiling-mounted units.
The answer was: nothing. A single-face sign mounted in the middle of an aisle is readable from one direction only. From the opposite direction, all you see is the back of the housing. In a warehouse aisle that people travel in both directions, that fails the basic visibility test at the heart of the exit sign requirements in NFPA 101 and OSHA’s exit routes standard, 29 CFR 1910.37.
Mike called me after the inspection. He wasn’t shouting, which was somehow worse. “Tell me there’s a double-face version I can swap these for,” he said. There was. I just hadn’t found it before I placed the order.
I opened the Kenall exit sign catalog that afternoon, and the spec sheet stopped me cold. Mounting type and face count weren’t buried in fine print. They were the first two columns of the model table. The fixture I needed existed, with a different part number, in the same series. The information had been there the entire time.
What the fix cost me
We expedited twelve double-face ceiling-mount fixtures and had them on site four days later. Mike’s crew spent the better part of a day swapping fixtures and rechecking the egress path. Between expedited freight, reinstallation labor, and the opened cartons we couldn’t put back into stock, the change order came to roughly $3,400. Actually $3,428. I looked it up while writing this, and it hasn’t gotten any less annoying.
The hard cost was money. The soft cost was worse. Mike had to explain a delay to a client who was already counting days. I had to explain to my own manager why my “standard exit sign” had caused a reorder and a failed inspection. The twelve single-face units eventually found homes on other jobs where wall mounting was the right call. The freight, the labor, and the credibility didn’t come back.
The exit sign specification guide I keep now
That mistake is why I now have a checklist. The old assumption that any exit sign works in any opening came from an era when the choices were simpler and a universal housing covered most situations. That assumption doesn’t survive contact with a modern warehouse. Whether you’re reading the Kenall commercial lighting catalog or any other manufacturer’s line, the spec sheet tells you what you actually need to decide: mounting, face count, voltage, and battery backup. None of that information is hidden. I just wasn’t reading it, because I trusted the part number in my head.
Here’s the checklist that now sits on my desk. I call it my exit sign specification guide, and you’re welcome to borrow it.
- Confirm the mounting location for each fixture against the plan. Wall-mounted signs above doors usually need a single-face housing. Ceiling-mounted signs over aisles usually need a double-face housing. Don’t merge them into one line item unless the exact part number covers both.
- Verify the voltage before quoting. Warehouse circuits are often 277V. Some exit sign models are multi-voltage, but many come in separate 120V and 277V versions. Ask for the electrical drawings or a photo of the junction box.
- Make the battery backup decision deliberate. If the sign is on a generator-backed emergency circuit, an internal battery may be redundant. If the sign loses power when the building does, battery backup isn’t optional. Either way, it should be a choice, not an assumption.
- Check local code amendments before ordering. NFPA 101 is adopted with amendments that vary by state and jurisdiction. Some areas require green legends or pictogram-style signs. Confirm the local rules with the authority having jurisdiction, especially if the project is in a jurisdiction you don’t know well.
A five-minute pre-quote check is cheap. A reorder, a slipped schedule, and a conversation with an inspector who found your mistake are expensive. I’m not going to pretend efficiency is glamorous. It’s a two-minute checklist that catches problems before they become change orders. Since September 2022, that checklist has stopped at least nine exit sign specification errors from going out the door. At least nine that I can prove. That’s a decent return on a boring piece of paper.
If you quote warehouse lighting packages, the high bay fixtures will get most of your attention. They should—they’re expensive and technically deep. But don’t treat exit signs as the throwaway part of the order. They’re usually the first thing an inspector checks, and they’re the item where one skipped detail can cost thousands. Open the spec sheet. Check the columns. That’s the whole guide.
