Inspire: Luton Sports Village

Inspiring everyone – from local community to Olympic athletes

About Inspire

Inspire Sports Village is home to one of the UK’s premier swimming facilities. You may recognise it from ITV’s celebrity diving program, Splash.

Its Olympic diving pool is 1 of 11 specialist diving centres in the UK, and it’s the home to a state-of-the-art ‘dry dive’ training area. Many champions, including Tom Daley, train there.

Inspire brings the best of wellbeing to its diverse and vibrant community. It’s where young children learn to swim, adults improve their health and future gold medallists train their way to Olympics.

Inspire Challenges

Rising energy costs. Public pools across the UK are struggling with unaffordable upkeep and energy bills. Many have been forced to close.Inspire was facing similar challenges. Inefficient lighting was taking a large chunk of their energy bill and was overdue a complete overhaul.
Ensuring their compliance to emergency lighting standards was costly, time-consuming and painstaking. Monthly and annual compliance tests and reports were done manually.
Investing into community, visitor experience, and safety – the outdated lighting system was no longer aligned with modern day expectations. The specialist areas where perfect, continuous light levels and minimal glare are required, needed a redesign.

Project Objective

CILS objective was to help Inspire reduce the leisure centre’s energy consumption, to lower running costs, whilst modernising its building lighting system for the best visitor experience.

To achieve this, we designed and implemented a smart LED lighting system and automated the emergency lighting.

£68.5k

saved on electricity each year at 20p/kWh

2,187.8 tonnes of CO2

equivalent saved over product lifetime

342,382 kWh

less energy consumed in single year

Want to hear from Inspire Sports Village directly? Watch our short video interview below.

“We want to save money so that we can re-invest into the organisation and the community. So, if I can spend 80% less on lighting, that’s 80% more I’ve got to invest in free school meals, the women’s only project, or a number of other community outreach projects for a diverse community that needs them.

This is a great example of a project where we invested our own money to provide a better sustainable position for the organisation.

There were opportunities beyond just lighting I was particularly keen on. Those intelligent sensors could allow us to reduce further our cost base and be more efficient in the longer term.“

– Stuart Trower
Director of Operations
Active Luton

Results

The new lighting is over 85% more efficient than before, saving a staggering 340 MWh each year. The leisure centre has significantly reduced its energy demand and its need for frequent lighting repair works.
At 20p per kWh, their energy savings are close to £70k each year.
The automated emergency lighting system saves further, on associated labour costs and staff time spent on manual testing and reporting.
Plus, they’ve improved their environmental footprint significantly. Over the system’s lifetime, about 2000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent of harmful greenhouse gases, are prevented from entering our atmosphere.
Inspire provide world-class services and we are proud to have supported them in improving their visitor experience.
To make swimming and diving as safe as possible, we’ve configured the required, constant levels of light in sports hall, pools and diving areas. And, when available, the system makes the most of light from the sun. Perfect illumination for badminton competitions, swimming diving and more, at minimal energy consumption.
In the sports hall and dry dive areas, we specifically designed the light levels for minimal glare.
Despite the recent energy price increases, all savings parameters have been exceeded; the initial 4.8 years payback period is now even less.
At Inspire, everyone has benefitted; the visitors, our planet, and, most importantly, the client. What was, previously, wasted energy has been turned into a huge bonus… massively upgraded and enhanced facilities.

Why CILS

CILS is a trusted lighting and smart building solution provider. We’re especially well-known in Luton. For years, we’ve been working in over 40 education, community and leisure buildings around Luton, to help decarbonise the borough.

Solutions Implemented

We designed the lighting system to ensure its longevity, with a life expectancy of 20 years and beyond.

In areas where lights and sensors may be under constant battering, or where there is a risk of water damage to lights, we took extra care to assess and create the most sustainable, enduring system, befitting the sports activity.

On the Enlighted smart system, every light fitting has its own processor, memory, and upgradable software – meaning motion, power consumption, ambient light levels and temperature, can all be monitored and proactively managed.

There is also an option to integrate other building systems, like heating or solar panels, with a simple plug load controller.

The emergency lighting system is also connected into the smart infrastructure and carries out all compliance testing automatically. The testing results are turned into a simple and clear report for the client, without any manual labour required.

Key Installation points:

All internal discharge lighting, including emergency lighting, has been upgraded to LED, combined with a state-of-the-art Enlighted control system.
New emergency lighting testing & reporting system – delivered via the Enlighted platform.
The number of maintained light fittings was reduced from 1,128 to 945, to optimise savings and arrange the best levels of lighting.

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