Before and After: LEDs

How much brighter will your indoor ice arena be if you put LED lighting in place?

That’s really hard to visualize. But at the Mayfield Recreation Complex in Caledon, ON they tracked their changes when they did their LED retrofit, showing what the impact of the lighting was on their rink. The retrofit took them from T5 fluorescents to LEDs.

Cam Coulter, Caledon’s Coordinator of Operations, explains that the retrofit replaced 66-T5 fixtures, with six bulbs in each fixture with 2×1′ LEDs. As you can see below, the colour of the lighting also changed, going from a warm to a bright white, which makes a “big difference to the sprarkle of the ice.”

LEDs have an expected life of 10 years, which in addition to saving energy, will result in less maintenance costs associated with changing burned-out bulbs.

This arena recently installed the REALice floodwater system which lets them maintain their sub-level ice with tap-temperature cold water — something they are thrilled about. The before and after pictures were taken by Cam Coulter. When he sent in the pictures, this is what he had to say about the lighting project:

“We recently did a lighting retrofit here at Mayfield which, in turn, had some visible good results to the REALice. The ice has the glossy look like you would not believe.”

The Town is very conscientious on the energy-saving methods they implement. Before installing the REALice system, a third-party engineering firm was hired to perform an M&V study on the arena’s energy spend. The results, together with a quality ice product, prompted the Town to outfit all its arenas with the system.