Zumtobel Provide the Perfect Light for Surrey Sports Park

Oct. 10, 2019

When Surrey Sports Park, one of Europe's premier sites for sport, health, wellbeing and leisure, needed an upgrade to its lighting controls, Zumtobel Lighting came up with a perfect solution that ticked all the boxes. The existing lighting controls used old dimming and switching technology that was incompatible with the latest luminaire technology and was reliant on expensive service engineers for programming and maintenance. Utilising Zumtobel’s Litecom system and the company’s CRAFT luminaires, a scheme was designed that provided upgradable technologies that are compatible with todays IP world and that can be easily upgraded to incorporate new luminaires & technology.

Surrey Sports Park is the permanent training base of Harlequins Rugby Club, Sure League netball team Surrey Storm, British basketball league club Surrey Heat, and UK top-five swimming club Guildford City. The facilities include a 50 metre 8 lane swimming pool, a 120 station gym/strength and conditioning area, 6 squash courts, two large exercise studios/conference rooms, spinning studio, a 1,000 seat arena, three artificial pitches including 3G turf and changing/multi purpose rooms. There is also on-site accommodation with en-suite rooms, extensive catering facilities and event delivery services.

The overriding factor in the brief for the refurbishment project was to improve the quality of lighting in critical areas such as the main arenas and squash courts using funding recouped from the energy savings obtained. This was made possible with the use of LITECOM, an incredibly flexible, great value lighting control system in conjunction with Zumtobel’s CRAFT high bay luminaires that add extra uniformity and efficiency to every lighting solution. CRAFT incorporates a carefully engineered housing and reflector concept, combined with innovative lens optics, ensuring an optimised light distribution and glare control (UGR 22) which, in turn, ensures excellent lighting quality. CRAFT has been used in the small arena, the main arena and the squash courts to provide a pleasant lighting atmosphere that helps enhance the safety and wellbeing of users.

The new LITECOM system is packed with software driven features that negates the need to replace modules when something different is required. It is also modular, therefore could be easily retro fitted to reuse the existing wiring and more importantly the facility could continue to run as usual and didn’t need to shut down whilst work was being carried out.

The original design for the main arena was for 500 lux and the new installation required 1000 lux for potential TV coverage of events.   The arenas are also using the shows APPS to create lighting patterns during live televised events.  These patterns are simple recalled by the push of a button when a particular action or event happens. In the arenas there is also further feature lighting as it creates a stunning effect and using LITECOM allows for easy and cost effective to controls. The arenas area are using the emergency monitoring software features as the luminaires are high up and difficult to get to but using the LITECOM system it automatically tests the emergency luminaires and reports exactly which luminaires may need attention, saving the sports park time and money and ensuring the emergency lighting in the arenas is always functional and compliant.

Other benefits include:

  • The Sports Park have taken advantage of the daylight linking features of LITECOM for the external AstroTurf pitches.  This wasn’t originally included in the scheme but was easy to add as the LITECOM system is predominately software driven so no complicated hardware components like other systems.
  • The spinning studio has had colour changing luminaires installed and the onsite team have used further software features in LITECOM so the instructors can control the lighting to change colour with the cycle programmes.
  • The Sports Park are now working on extra colour changing facade lighting as a result of understanding and being able to use LITECOM themselves.  This means the end user can take advantage of all the software features available to them that are built into the LITECOM CCD controllers. 
  • The new swimming pool lighting could easily be programmed by the onsite maintenance team without any involvement from Zumtobel.
  • Controllers can now control so many luminaires from a single unit that Surrey Sports Park have spare capacity to add any extra lighting without any additional cost in hardware or commissioning as they can do this themselves.
  • As the system has been so flexible, Surrey have introduced more features that were not originally planned as these can be very easily included.
  • Different control protocols are being used with LITECOM in this installation and Surrey Sports Park now has the flexibility to choose the luminaires appropriate for the task.  They do not have to choose luminaires based on what the control system can communicate with.
  • The bottom Spartan Hockey pitch has always needed someone to walk down each afternoon and the end of the night to turn on/off the lights. After linking a LITECOM unit to a separate building but using the existing network they can now switch the pitch lighting off with the touch screen on the reception desk.

Steve Beckingham, Service Support Manager for Estates, Facilities and Commercial Services at Surrey Sports Park commented.  “The LITECOM system has met all the goals of the staff here and we are all very pleased with the result.  The maintenance teams can now roam the facility with a laptop or any other smart device to adjust, check or change settings.  LITECOM has been so good with the time based management features and touchscreen at the reception desk for intuitive control that we have been able to do away with most of the PIR sensors and scene controllers we had installed before.  The reception staff are now able to have full control and view all the lighting on in the main areas and external pitches to ensure they are only lit at the most appropriate times and levels.  The management team are delighted as the staff can intuitively and simply control the lights as and when required and users of the building have a much better lighting system for exercising with appropriate scene setting”.

Contact:

ZumtobelTel: +44 (0) 1388 420042

Email:

[email protected]

Web site:

www.zumtobel.co.uk