April 15, 2009 - Lighting
The State of Arizona’s Property Management Company, Opus West, wanted to reduce maintenance and lighting costs for some of their parking garages, which used HID fixtures. Opus turned to Magnaray for a solution.
Magnaray recommended using a 106 watt parking garage unit, that comprises two 50-watt, twin T5 lamp housings with one remote ballast to replace two 175-watt metal halide units in each six-car parking bay. This system provides superior lighting, with less glare and truer color, plus instant-on capability, which can enable motion sensing to achieve added energy savings.
The advantage is that the T5 systems are relatively the same to HID in terms of initial costs, according to Magnaray. But with twin T5 lamps and program start ballasts, the fluorescent lamps have a longer life expectancy of 40,000-45,000 hours with 12-24 hour burn cycles. Total consumption for the two-unit assembly is 106 total watts per bay, less the one-third of the 390-watt consumption of metal halides, the company says.
Mark Stromgren, Chief Engineer for Opus West, says that while the improved light quality makes people safer and more secure, the big payoff is better light quality, with a 70 percent savings in energy, and 50 percent savings in maintenance, which is expected to pay for the HID-to-fluorescent lighting conversion in less than 2 years.
The State of Arizona has since mandated the use of this instant-on fluorescent system for all future parking structures.
