Chalmor wins the EMILAS Sports Lighting Award for the second consecutive year!
In an award-winning project, Chalmor has supplied a combination of its Brilliance luminaires and BlueWave Controllers to help Bedford Borough Council reduce its electrical consumption and carbon emissions by 60.2%. Operational costs for these areas have been reduced by 62%.
Project cost £30,000 Savings per year £8,000 C°² saving/Tonnes 34
Bedford Borough Council has, for a number of years, been seeking to reduce both their energy costs and carbon emissions. In order to drive this strategy forward, the Council has set itself a target of reducing emissions by 40% by 2015. For one of its many schemes the Council appointed Chalmor to carry out the replacement of lighting at the Bedford International Athletics Stadium.
As a result of this innovative scheme, Chalmor was overall winner for the second consecutive year in the Sports Lighting category of the EMILAS (Energy Management and Innovation in Lighting Award Scheme) awards. In 2009 Chalmor won the category with a scheme for Nottingham City Council, further underpinning Chalmor’s expertise in the niche area of sports lighting.
In the stadium and running track areas, existing high pressure sodium (SON) fittings were replaced with Chalmor’s 6 x 54W and 4 x 54W Brilliance T5 fittings, in conjunction with OSRAM Constant Output (24,000 hours) T5 fluorescent lamps. Chalmor’s lighting design team were conscious of the facilities’ fluctuating temperatures in both summer and winter and the OSRAM lamp solution performs at near optimum regardless of the temperature fluctuations. The Brilliance lumminaires are linked to BlueWave lighting controllers to provide zoning of the sports halls.
The sports halls, for example, are now illuminated on a hall by hall basis, with lights set to a background level when unoccupied. A further enhancement has been achieved by separating the running track which is now controlled to be lit during use only. This level of control was not possible with the SON lighting because of the extended warm-up times of these lamps, the lack of opportunity for stage switching and inappropriate circuit layouts.
In addition, the quality of the lighting has been greatly improved in terms of colour rendering and colour appearance, while during occupancy maintained luminance is now an average of 452 lux.
This is accompanied by improved light distribution through the use of two levels of illumination to ensure there are no areas of darkness in unused areas.
“We were very pleased with the overall scheme and the management of the project. Chalmor worked around the activities in this busy stadium to minimise disruption to athletes,” commented the Stadium Manager Charlotte Conroy. “We have also had very positive feedback about the improved lighting quality from the users,” she added.