In the summer of 2022, I received a call from the operations manager at our local animal shelter. Someone I did not recognize recommended that I be contacted to help with an energy-saving retrofit for their existing lighting system. Having spent much of my life with dogs, I was happy to drop down and see what I could do.
Over Covid, many people added cats and dogs to their homes, and, unfortunately, a lot of these poor animals were given up as their owners returned to their post-Covid lives. Many shelters are at capacity and finding themselves with fewer donations in a difficult economy as well as having to endure inflated energy costs. The Ops manager was determined to reduce energy consumption by converting old fluorescent and high-intensity discharge lights to LED.
After discussing the situation with my business partner (another dog lover), we decided to offer our services at cost. We also contacted one of our friendly dog-loving contractors and asked the same of them, to which they graciously accepted. We then met on-site to take inventory of the existing lighting and spent time understanding the needs and desires of our client.
As with many properties of this calibre, the lighting systems installed represented the state of the art for that day. Inside the building, we found deep-celled parabolic fluorescents in the corridors and administration offices, surface-mounted fluorescent light clouds (we used to call Chicklets after the popular gum), a variety of downlights and architectural indirect fixtures and wall sconces. On the exterior of the building, we found unique round metal halide wall sconces with yellowed polycarbonate lenses recessed into decorative masonry. The parking lot and access driveways had pole-mounted metal halide shoeboxes.
Our client could not afford to tackle everything at once due to funding and therefore broke the upgrade into smaller phases, with the most problematic to be done first. This turned out to be the exterior lighting which was half functional, along with the old yellowed and bug/dust filled 2 x 40W U-lamp Chicklets in the dog and cat showing rooms which we replaced with our CReS 6™ 35W surface mounted white-tunable LED one-to-one.
After installation, the surface wraps were wirelessly adjusted with our free SMART BLU™ CLOUD app to the colour temperature and brightness of the client’s choosing.
Having been exposed to many retrofits over the preceding decades, my first inclination is to try and reuse as much of the old fixtures as possible. In most situations, our customers need only dispose of old lenses, lamps, and ballasts, which can be refreshed with economical upgrades without having to send fixture bodies to the landfill. Also, retrofits can save significant cleaning time if they can be done without removing dirty housings from interior ceilings. Often we can add a new lens or a retrofit door kit to give the old fixtures a brand-new look.
This method was used to attack the old yellowed exterior wall sconces by creating custom round printed circuit boards with LEDs to replace the old 100W metal halide lamp. The boards were simply mounted to the reflector frame with 3 screws.
The old ballast was replaced with our 35W BLU DRiVe™ along with a plug-in low voltage cable to feed the round LED board, and a new flat white acrylic lens replaced the old, yellowed polycarbonate. Done. This took all of 15-20 minutes per fixture.
After completion, we were able to wirelessly program all 19 wall packs as a group. The client can now set their colour between 2700K to 6500K and adjust brightness from 100% to 0. All of this at a fraction of what new fixtures would have cost. The customer is delighted with the results, and we are looking forward to the next phase, which should be the subject of a follow-up post.
