This page compares a programmable LED text display with what it usually replaces along this coast. It asks what exactly the board is taking over, what three seasons of printed material really cost, how long a message may be before it stops working, whether a small strip survives a seafront position, where the text comes from once the season starts, and what the board needs from your electrician on fitting day.
LED scrolling sign in Kaštela — manufacturing, installation, quote
Along the Kaštela waterfronts the scrolling text board almost always replaces something that already exists. Every riva from Kaštel Sućurac to Kaštel Štafilić has its chalked A-boards outside the cafés, its printed banners cable-tied to railings for the summer, its laminated sheets taped inside apartment agency windows, and its roll-up banners that fade by August. Those things are not free - they are simply paid for in small amounts, several times a season, by somebody who never adds the total up. That is the honest way to judge a programmable text display in a place like this: not against an imagined ideal, but against the annual cost and the annual nuisance of the printed material it is meant to retire.
What is the board replacing, exactly?
Write the list before you look at any specification
List everything you currently print, chalk, tape or reprint: the daily menu, the excursion times, the apartment availability notice in a Kaštel Kambelovac window, the seasonal opening hours, the sign that says the terrace is open despite the building work. Mark how often each one changes. Anything changing more than monthly is a genuine candidate for a text board; anything that has been the same for two years should stay printed, because print is cheaper, needs no power and never fails. Most clients find that three or four of their notices carry the whole business case and the rest are irrelevant to it.
What does a printed banner really cost over three seasons?
Small sums, several times a year, plus the time
Take the list you have just made and put a figure and a frequency against each item - the print itself, the artwork, the fixings, and the half hour somebody spends replacing it, which is the part everyone omits. Then note what it costs when a notice is wrong for a fortnight because reprinting it was not worth the trouble. Over three summers on an exposed waterfront, where sun and salt take the colour out of anything printed, that total is frequently larger than a modest text board and its installation. If it is not larger, we would rather you kept the banners, and we will say so.
How long may one message be before it stops working?
Character height, line length and the walking reader
Legibility is a trade between how tall the characters are and how many of them fit. A pedestrian on the Kaštel Gomilica waterfront reading from four or five metres needs a certain character height, and that height fixes the number of characters on the line, which in turn fixes the physical length of the board - built from modules of 32 by 16 centimetres, so the length comes in fixed steps. Count the characters in your longest genuine message, diacritics included, and work backwards from there. One clear line almost always beats two cramped ones, and a message that has to scroll for eight seconds will be read by nobody who is walking.
Does a small strip survive a seafront position?
Sealing, fixings and the cleaning nobody plans for
It does, if it is built for the position rather than bought on price. Facing Kaštela Bay the unit is sealed to IP65 with cable entries turned downwards and a drainage point at the bottom of the enclosure, and the fixings and brackets are as important as the board itself, because salt attacks them first. Behind glass the problem inverts: heat and reflection rather than water, so we leave a ventilation gap and never mount hard against the pane. Either way, plan on a rinse and a look twice a year. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a board that lasts and one that becomes an eyesore.
Where does the text come from once the season starts?
Scheduling in advance beats typing every morning
The commonest mistake is treating the board as something to be edited daily. In practice you prepare a list of items with start and end times before the season and let it run: opening hours by weekday, the excursion timetable, the notice that appears only in the first week of September. Text reaches the board over Wi-Fi, over a network cable or from a USB stick, and Wi-Fi is what most seafront installations use, because it avoids running a data cable to a window position. Daily edits then become the exception - which is exactly what you want in July, when nobody has time for them.
What does the board need from your electrician on fitting day?
Supply, isolation and protection against summer storms
Very little, but it needs to be right. A dedicated supply at the board position with the rating stated in our offer, a means of isolation that somebody can actually reach, residual current protection, and surge protection on the circuit - the last of these matters on this coast, where a summer storm takes out more small electronics than any other cause. Text boards draw modest current because only the lit pixels consume power and text lights a small fraction of them, so the cable is rarely the issue. We state the connected load in the offer so your electrician prepares once rather than twice.
