The University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona is host to a number of events throughout the year, both entertainment and professional sports. The NFL’s Arizona Cardinals call the stadium home, and this season the league will use the venue as host of 2015 Super Bowl.
While in most cases this isn’t that big of a deal, what makes it newsworthy on a technology website is that this year the sport’s biggest game will for the first time ever be played using LED lights.
Ephesus Lighting was the company tasked with installing all of the high-performance LED lights throughout the stadium. Specifically, there were 312 fixtures to place. This might seem like a lot, but it’s actually considerably less than what the stadium had in place prior: 780 metal halide fixtures.
Continuing the comparison between yesterday’s technology and today’s new solutions, the LED stadium lights will use only 310,000 watts of energy as compared to the 1.24 million watts needed to power the previous system. What’s more, on average most venues have experienced a 75% reduction in overall sports-lighting energy consumption; they’ve also seen a reduced load on the air conditioning system to offset the heat generated by the metal halide lights.
Beyond numbers, the LED lights are incredibly convenient for the stadium operations team, as the lights can be turned on with a simple flick of the switch. With the previous system, timing needed to be considered as it took the metal halide fixtures 20 minutes to warm up. The on / off feature also allows facility operators to create light shows for fan entertainment.
In terms of brightness, LED stadium lights have already proven to provide better, more uniform lighting on the ground, all but eliminating shadows and creating not only a better playing surface for the competitors, but a better viewing stage for the fans in the stands and those at home watching the game on their high-definition televisions.
Now, while news of this technology being showcased on a stage as global as the Super Bowl is certainly exciting, one thing the common fan will likely not take into consideration is how the LED technology is protected from things like weather-related surge events like lightning, which can damage AC power lines and in turn render the new lighting fixtures useless.
A company that specializes in protecting the technology from these sorts of events is Littelfuse, the industry leader when it comes to circuit protection. The Chicago-based company offers a wide variety of circuit protection components, including an entire roster that specializes in protecting outdoor LED lighting from induced surge events.
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