The next time you’re at Markin Tennis Stadium, you might want to look up. Thanks to the efforts of Andy Perigo, Susan Lindemann, and the rest of the Facilities Management team, the lights of Markin Stadium have become a literal shining example of sustainability at work on the Kalamazoo College Campus.
The lamps at Markin have just been retrofitted – that is, they’ve been improved past their original manufactured state. The power of a lamp is measured using watts, which is the measure of the energy consumed to produce light (contrary to popular belief, a watt is not a measure of a light’s brightness). The old lights at Markin were 54-watt high-output fluorescent tubes; under the retrofit, we’ve replaced them with 25-watt LEDs. While that might not seem like a big difference at first, the math says otherwise!
There are 528 lamps at Markin, which use 54 watts each. Ultimately, that means that Markin was using 28, 512 watts per hour. According to the athletics department, Markin lights are on for 90 hours a week – 28,512 watts/hr multiplied by those 90 hours (and then divided by 1000 in order to convert the number to kilowatts/hour, the standard used by power companies to bill the college) is 2,566.08 kw/hrs per week!
When the same math is done with the new lamps, which use 25 watts, Markin only uses 1188 kw/hrs per week (over a 50% reduction!). When both numbers are multiplied by the 36 weeks Markin is used per year, the end result is stark. By retrofitting Markin lights, we save 42,768 kw/hrs per year! That’s saving nearly as much energy as would be necessary to power ten 1500sqft houses for a year!
The new lights will shine just as bright, meaning that most of the campus community might never know that any changes occurred! Even so, this retrofit was an incredibly important one. There are also significant economic savings, but what’s more vital is the fact that the decision to switch out the lamps is a step towards a greener campus. Not only does this action support the resource conservation goal of the College’s Climate Action Plan, but it also represents how sustainable changes are made on this campus. Technology drives so much of what we do here, but new tech is only as good as the people who advocate for and implement it. The people who seize those opportunities – like campus electrician Andy Perigo, who is responsible for the amazing progress with the Markin lights – are absolutely essential to making this campus as environmentally friendly as possible, and deserve all of our gratitude.
