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Space museum lights up exhibits with energy savings
Jan 15 2010
The Evergreen Space Museum is one half of the popular Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum located in the heart of Oregon’s wine country. A recent lighting upgrade transformed the 120,000-square-foot building into a lighter and brighter venue, and is helping to save on the museum’s annual energy bill.
Like other nonprofit organizations, the museum was looking for ways to lower its operating costs to preserve funds for artifacts and its popular aviation and space-related science education program. With information from its local utility, McMinnville Water & Light, the museum took advantage of incentives to upgrade its lighting and reduce its energy costs.
With the help of general contractor and BPA Technical Services Provider ARMCO (Abacus Resource Management Company), led by Rich Davis, the museum replaced 22, 750-watt incandescent bulbs with 121-watt LED lights made by PixelArc. They also replaced 60, 300-watt quartz lights in the display cases with 15-watt LED lights made by LED Inc., and replaced 36, 25-watt incandescent lights in the elevators with 5-watt LED lights made by OptiLED. Advanced lighting controls were installed to reduce the operating time of the new LED lights and the overhead fluorescent lights. Incentives from the utility helped cover the museum’s upfront costs. Other energy efficiency measures were also implemented including upgrades to its HVAC system controls. At the Space Museum grand opening in June of 2008, the museum used approximately 400,000 kilowatt hours to power its facility the first month. Fourteen months later, after upgrading the lighting and HVAC controls, they're using just a quarter of the same amount of energy—with no negative impact on the customer experience.
“We’re a museum and we need to have our lights on,” said Ken Till, Director of Space Museum Operations, “but this process has shown us how we can use our lights and energy more wisely with high-efficiency fixtures.”
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