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Port Adelaide Football Club has been training at Alberton Oval in Adelaide since 1880. That’s about the time the incandescent light bulb was invented. As the decades have rolled past, the club has moved with the times and built the facilities an up-to-date sporting organisation needs. The club’s administration has followed these innovations around the oval as they shifted from a grandstand built in 1903 to the new stand next to it in 1964 before ending up in the state-of-the-art Allan Scott Power Headquarters on the other side of the ground. Now that incandescent technology is on the way out, Port Adelaide is again keeping up with new developments and embracing the LED revolution.
The main focus of the Port Adelaide Football Club is on field success. Over its long history it has proved extraordinarily good at attaining that success with 36 premierships in one of Australian rules football’s major competitions, the SANFL in Adelaide. Back in the day it took on the nation’s best and became Champions of Australia four times. Such was its dominance of the local league it managed to secure a place in the AFL, the elite national competition that grew out of the old VFL in Melbourne. It’s the equivalent of a suburban Brisbane rugby league team taking a place beside the Brisbane Broncos in the NRL. In the twenty odd years it has been in the AFL, Port has been a regular finalist with two grand final appearances and one premiership.
That’s not to say that Port neglect their off-field presence. To the contrary, the club is renowned for its involvement in Indigenous programs and has boldly pursued engagement with China. It plays an annual match for premiership points in Shanghai and features heavily in the AFL games broadcast on Chinese TV networks. It’s not surprising that Haneco are happy to sponsor such a progressive club. And when it came to replace the energy sapping conventional lighting that was eating into the club’s budget, Port found that in Haneco it had a ready-made partner with the expertise it needed to do the job. Even though the Allan Scott Power Headquarters is a relatively new building, it was completed just before LED took off. It has substantial office spaces, kitchens, a swimming pool and a vast indoor training area that these days costs too much to light with conventional luminaires.
It proved to be a reasonably straightforward task to upgrade the lighting to LED because the replacement was one-for-one and Haneco had the range to fill all the building’s requirements, including the car park and exterior lights. For instance, the swimming pool was lit by a mix of halogen and fluorescents. The fluorescents were replaced by moisture resistant TRIPROOF LED battens. The halogens were replaced by another outdoor IP65 rated fixture, CALEO. The high reflectivity of swimming pools makes them tricky to light, but the CALEOs mounted on the wall do the job very effectively.
The all-important lighting of the big training area proved a little more difficult. Initially the thirty-six 250W halogen highbays were swapped for 100W LED SKYPAD highbays, but this turned out to diminish the light levels slightly. The issue was solved by using 120W SKYPADs instead. Brian Condon, the Facilities Manager at the club, remarked that “The coaches were impressed with the improvement in illumination… Plus the fact that they come on instantly – you don’t have to plan ahead.”
Sometimes lighting is doing its job best when no-one notices it. The spacious kitchen along with the administration area are simply lit by unobtrusive GALAXY LED panels that provide effective and no fuss task lighting. The car parks now use FLOODSL LED floodlights that draw way less than half the power of the halogens they superseded – fittings that previously consumed 70 watts now draw only 30 watts and no-one is left in the dark. In keeping with the shape of the ground and the Aussie rules ball, the exterior bunker lights are the ovoid LUNA. LED downlights and oyster lights along with PAR 38 and LED replacements for fluorescent tubes completed a thorough modernisation of the lighting in the football areas including the players’ locker room.
As well as a significant reduction in running costs, the upgrade to LED allowed for some of the oyster and LED batten luminaires to double as emergency lighting. Some of these fixtures include self-charging batteries that spring into action during a blackout and keep the light on at a level sufficient for people to find their way. The installation of the numerous new fittings was completed by Platinum Electricians. A company under the Haneco umbrella, Lucesco Lighting, helped ensure that rebates on Haneco products listed under the SA government’s REES energy saving scheme kept costs down.
As the team resumes training for the 2019 season with several new faces, the sense of a fresh start is everywhere at Alberton. Whatever happens next season, Haneco’s lights will keep the Power’s headquarters as bright as its future for years to come.
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