Lighting upgrade for a strata property

The Marine Apartments is an eight-storey, 43-apartment complex, set back from Port Philip Bay. The owner corporation of the 16-year-old building had been actively seeking ways to reduce the building’s energy consumption for close to five years.

In 2009, Marine Apartments was one of ten apartment complexes to sign up to the first round of the City of Port Philip’s SOCs & Blocks (Sustainable Owners Corporations and Apartment Blocks) program. The program aims to encourage the uptake of sustainable technologies and practices in the City of Port Phillip. The free program offered a council-engaged consultant to undertake a sustainability assessment. 

A lighting upgrade of common-area lighting was highlighted as one of the actions that offered the best return on investment, prompting the owner’s corporation to investigate a range of lighting technologies. The lighting upgrade was split into two stages - the back-of-house areas, including a two-level car park, approved for stage 1, and the front-of-house areas, including foyers and internal lift lobbies, for stage 2.

The standard emergency lighting in the car park featured a mixture of single and twin 36 W T8 fluorescent tube fixtures driven by electronic ballasts. The lights operated 24/7 and had no energy-saving controls. The corporation assessed the following technologies: T5 fluorescent tubes, LED tubes with networked controls system and Chamaeleon LED light.

The decision was made to go with the Chamaeleon LED light as it offered 85% energy savings and reduced maintenance stemming from the product’s 50,000 hour lifetime, according to owners corporation committee executive James Rodrigo. The light also had a lower redundancy factor than other lighting solutions with separate control systems, reducing the risk of failure, which could result in a whole zone of lights failing.

The Chamaeleon light operates on a standby mode when unoccupied. The average standby usage is 7.5 W, which increases to 28 W when a presence is detected in the area via a microwave sensor.

The basement and ground levels in the car park required 24-hour lighting, including emergency lighting. The existing 159 T8 fluorescent tubes and six compact fluorescent lights were replaced with 104 Chamaeleon lights, including 19 emergency lights, generating lighting levels above those specified in the Australian standards for car park driveways. The ceiling-mounted 10-chip Chamaeleon light was specified by Enlighten following a site audit and installed by Delmore Electriks.

Prior to the retrofit, car park lighting accounted for 24.4% of the Marine Apartments’ total electricity bill. Front-of-house lighting (foyers, lift lobbies) accounted for a further 34% of the bill. Following the car park lighting retrofit, the average annual consumption per dwelling dropped by 40%, from 2487 to 1490 kWh.

 

Fluorescent lights at car park entry.

Chamaeleon LED lights post retrofit.

The building’s executive committee applied for Victorian Energy Efficiency Certificates from the project under the Energy Savings Incentive (ESI) Scheme, as the Chamaeleon has been accepted for use in commercial lighting upgrade projects. The project’s Accredited Certificate Provider, Ecovantage, generated 136 certificates returning a net sum of $1080 to Marine Apartments.

“We have achieved an $8700 saving per year whilst improving the light output in our car park by 20%. We made further savings by cancelling a works order to replace 26 of the 120 fluorescent fixtures that were not working and we no longer have to deal with escalating maintenance costs of the 16-year-old fluorescent light fittings,” said Rodrigo.