Skeena Valley Golf Course
31/08/19
Step3Project teamed up with the Skeena Valley Golf course to fund a replacement of the old fluorescent light fixtures with new highly efficient LED panels. Funded by 310 purchases of Step3 apparel, this project was completed with help from Mike Graydon, Kyle Demedeiros, and Doug McKay from Graydon Electric and volunteer efforts from Zach Wilson and Mackenzie Walker.
Step3Project x Skeena Valley Golf Course
This installation was a huge learning experience and something that will help immensely with the planning of future projects going forward. At the beginning of the summer, we decided we would like to help out the local golf course in Terrace, BC because it was a community-owned cooperative. This means we would not only make it a greener building but also create savings to be used to benefit the course and the community.
We originally wanted to stick to the exact Step3Project pursuit and install solar on the roof. Unfortunately, due to the way the golf course is set up; with multiple buildings on the property, the service coming from the hydro line was too large to make a small scale installation worth-while. As we still wanted to help out the course and the community, we had to come up with another plan. With lots of help from my friend Kyle Demedeiros at Graydon Electric, we decided that we could remove all 102 of the old 40-watt fluorescent light panels and 20 individual 60-watt bulbs in the clubhouse and replace them with 37 new, efficient LED panels and 20 LED bulbs.
In doing this we still succeeded in accomplishing our goal of creating a greener building, just in a different way. With these new panels, the golf course is a greener building with a much smaller footprint (3060 watts less!!!) but also costs less to operate. These new LED panels reduce the power draw of the building which means there are also cost-savings associated with their installation. An estimation would be that the lights are operational for 12-14 hours per day, however, most of the time not all lights are active meaning that we can assume a conservative 8 hours of operation per day on average. That means that these new panels will save the course at least $1.5 per day or upwards of $40 per month. And that is just a conservative estimate. Because the course is a cooperative, that money will be going directly back into the course for the benefit of the entire community.
Overall this project had the equivalent energy savings of installing a 4500 Watt solar system as the sun only shines at its apex for about 4-5 hours per day. That installation would have required approximately 1500 purchases to fund, meaning each piece of apparel is being used to save even more energy than we had hoped! Instead of one 3 watt lightbulb being powered, you are powering 3 3 watt lightbulbs for life! Thank you!
