Dassault Falcon Jet Corp., the U.S.-based division of France’s Dassault Aviation, handles marketing and support for the Falcon family of business jets in North and South America. Its 172,000-square foot corporate design center in Little Ferry, N.J., adjacent to the Teterboro Airport, houses a Flight Operations department and a distribution center for Falcon jet parts and employs about 400 people in sales, marketing, design and support roles. The company was looking for an improvement in lighting maintenance and energy costs as part of a progressive approach to innovation through environmentally aware and efficient operational processes.
The facility’s lighting — T8 fluorescents and 1000W, 400W, and 175W metal halides — lacked many key features Dassault Falcon Jet deemed essential to energy efficient operation, including the ability to easily dim, turn off, or schedule lighting. In addition to excessive energy use, maintenance costs added another 10% to operating costs. Dassault worked with energy consultant BPL Carbon Free Solutions, LLC, to review a variety of lighting alternatives.
The resulting lighting retrofit delivered a 90% reduction in lighting energy usage annually, leading to more than $53,000 in annual energy cost savings. The upgrade also reduced maintenance needed, yielding an additional $9,250 in annual savings.
The first phase of the lighting project focused on replacing the existing fixtures in the high bay warehouse space with Digital Lumens' high bay intelligent LED fixtures. These low occupancy areas, with racked aisles for pick-and-pack functions, have facility personnel entering and exiting for only 30 to 40 seconds at a time. Therefore, when people are not in the aisles, the lights can dim during the day or turn off at night.
After securing benefits of the new system in high bay spaces, Dassault needed suitable lighting for the low bay areas of the facility, previously lit with T8 fluorescents and 175W metal halides. Covering roughly 30% of the distribution center, the low bay areas serve quality assurance functions. In this area, employees require high light levels to read barcodes and take pictures of aircraft parts and components. They chose DL’s LLE (linear intelligent LED fixtures).
This combination of intelligent fixtures provided the distribution center with facility-wide intelligence, giving the facility manager the ability to control all fixtures in all spaces — individually or grouped — through the LightRules platform and track operational patterns and energy usage across the entire facility.
“Having the ability to change the schedules and the light levels anywhere in the facility is very helpful,” said Facility Manager James Mosca. “Also, being able to see the amount of electricity used and pull data to show exactly what these new lights are doing for us is incredible.”
