St. Anne Catholic School, located in Houston, TX, educates students from 52 zip codes across the Greater Houston Area and has been operating since 1930. A true representation of a city as diverse as Houston, St. Anne Catholic School’s student population includes Pre-K through 8^th graders from all backgrounds.  Being continually committed to offering their students a productive learning environment, the school decided to begin the process of upgrading their existing, outdated lighting with energy efficient LED’s. After some evaluation, it was determined the school’s gym would be a perfect place to start.

The existing metal halide lighting in the gym high bays were selected due to a variety of drawbacks in comparison with LED fixtures.  Metal halide technology is not only inefficient, but also the light output begins to degrade over time starting the moment it is first turned on.  This leads to inconsistent lighting distribution as bulbs go out at different times and generally lose 50% of their output after only 10,000 hours. They also rely on a ballast that acts as another failure point that will need to be replaced frequently.  In a gym application, lifts must be used to change burned out bulbs or failed ballasts, and because of the difficulty of access, if one is replaced most maintenance personnel replace both ballast and bulb in an attempt to reduce the number of failures per fixture.  This results in a waste of time, material, and most importantly, budget money that could be better allocated.

In partnership with Climatec, a building automation and controls company, NEUTEX LED was able to upgrade the original 400W Metal Halide fixtures to the latest LED technology.  NEUTEX utilized its DLC Certified LED High Bay series with a Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) of 5000K for this project.  The Neutex High Bays consist of a die cast aluminum housing with a glass diffuser and utilize Samsung LED’s and a Meanwell driver engineered according to NTX Labs specifications. Using IES files generated by NTX Labs to create a photometric layout of the gym area, NEUTEX determined that using 150W High bays in the center area and 100W High Bays around the perimeter would offer the optimal light levels. The electricity usage for the gym is estimated to drop by over 75% from 70,176 kWh to 14,912 kWh annually. These savings are in addition to the savings of having fixtures that are rated to be maintenance free for over 50,000 hours.

During the course of this project, budget constraints became a challenge for the historic, local Catholic School.  In an effort to be sure the customer ended up with the optimal solution and in accordance with the NEUTEX Mission statement that “success has always been based on integrity, selflessness, value creation, and social responsibility,” NEUTEX donated 10 of the 100W LED High Bay fixtures to St. Anne Catholic School.

NEUTEX LED Lighting®­ is the premier division of the NEUTEX Advanced Energy Group, Inc. ®­ family of companies.  NEUTEX designs, tests, manufactures and sells some of the industry’s best LED lighting solutions. NEUTEX Corporate headquarters and state-of-the-art manufacturing facility located in Houston, TX, leads the group of six NEUTEX LED manufacturing facilities found world-wide.