In 2013, rising utility expenses and maintenance headaches prompted Brad Heykoop, Executive Pastor of Operations, to contact William Schuh with Electrical Innovations Contracting (EIC), and SES Certified LED Lighting Consultant Nelson Scott, to perform a property-wide energy analysis.
Brad wanted a way to provide efficiencies in lighting and mechanical systems that would result in significant savings and provide the Church elders an acceptable return on investment. EIC and SES worked together to retrofit existing fixture housings with LED technology which reduced cost and allowed the Elders to approve the church lighting project. The team retrofitted high output parking lot fixtures, can housings and pendants with LED technology eliminating the maintenance issues with the current fluorescent, metal halide and incandescent technology.
The challenges in lighting varied greatly throughout the property. The parking lot had metal halide fixtures that did not provide optimal light saturation between poles. Aside from energy savings, improvement in lighting quality and safety for church and activity-goers was a key objective given to the team.
The EIC and SES team evaluated all options in the retrofit of each fixture and were able to improve Waterstone’s existing lighting conditions and lighting fixtures with LED Lighting technology by precisely evaluating the following key areas:
- Lumen Output
- Color temperature
- Fixture Height
- Light Intensity
- Lighting Saturation
- Color Reproduction
Additional factors considered for this Colorado church lighting project were installation time and disruption to the operations of the school. The installation time for a new fixture is far greater than retrofitting existing fixtures because of the new fixture size, manpower needed and disposal costs of old fixtures. In the retrofit, the time needed was 10 minutes per fixture as opposed to 45 minutes for complete fixture replacement. By retrofitting existing fixtures with LED linear tubes, we were able to provide an ROI acceptable to the church leadership and provide the following key benefits:
- Eliminated fluorescent ballast maintenance – LED linear tubes have a built in driver.
- Improved light quality – Light quality was dramatically improved with color temperature
and light saturation is superior to fluorescent technology. - Reduced disposable hardware quantity by 33% – Because LED linear tubes throw the light
where needed (180 degrees down instead of 360 degrees) we achieved the same lumen
output needed for this application by de-lamping each fixture from 3 lamps to 2. - Eliminated maintenance – LED linear tubes have a 70,000 hour life and will enable the church not to spend resources maintaining for at least 17 years.
More importantly, when it came to the Church’s private school, the EIC and SES team analyzed if providing a new 2 x 4 fixture in the classrooms made financial sense. Here is the result of their analysis:
- New LED Fixture Cost – $162.50/each – $95,062/total – 40 Watts
- LED retrofit Fixture Cost – $99/each – $57,915/total – 40 Watts
Read Waterstone Community Church’s SES Lighting review in our Testimonials section.