Green Lighting

Berri is a thriving town on the Murray River in South Australia. It’s home to citrus orchards, the Big Orange and the Berri Bowling Club. The club has been going since 1928 and now boasts extensive undercover greens for bowling in any weather, day and night. The artificial greens are named in honour of the late Audrey Hefford, a member of the Bowls Australia Hall of Fame who represented Australia at the highest level and won numerous titles in a long and distinguished career. These are greens that host serious competition.

So when it came to lighting the greens, a good even spread of light was essential. As you can see above, the first attempt to illuminate them using LED highbays was not completely successful. That sort of uneven light interferes with depth perception and makes it difficult for bowlers. Traditionally, greens have been lit from above to minimize the length of shadow cast by the bowls so that players can make accurate judgements of the distance and relative position of the bowls anywhere on the green. So mounting extra lights from an angle could create a new problem in trying to solve the old one.

The enormous roof is lined with aluminium foil insulation, which effectively keeps the temperature under control on the frequent 35 degree plus days Berri gets in summer. It turns out that the highly reflective material is not only useful for insulation, but provides part of the solution for better lighting of the greens. The design uses Haneco’s  PARX 200W  floodlight which pumps out just under 25,000 lumens.  Directing them straight to the surface would be too bright. But angling them toward the reflective ceiling reduces glare, still substantially increases the light levels and provides an evenly lit playing surface.

The improved result has been achieved with efficient LED lighting (PARX 200W emits 124 lumens per watt) using power from solar panels for an artificial surface. So the club can boast about its green credentials in saving power and water. Berri Bowling Club is pleased with the result, with Club President Barry Hollis saying: “ We’re pretty happy with what’s happened.  It evened the light out.”  The artificial greens are a dark matte colour and non-reflective, so it was a challenging task to improve the lux levels without creating too much glare.

The Haneco lights were installed by Mark Kosturjak of MWK Electrical with the lights provided by MM Electrical Merchandising in Berri.