Etihad Stadium

Etihad Stadium is a 52,000 seat multi-purpose facility designed to cater for major sporting and entertainment events. Since opening on March 9, 2000, well over 32 million people have passed through the venue’s turnstiles.

In 2012, Honeywell was tasked with reviewing the Emergency and Exit Lighting within the stadium. With the existing system reaching the end of its serviceable life the maintenance costs which were already high had reached a level which was not sustainable at $1,083,000 in costs over a 7 year period.

With the stadium receiving such a high level of foot traffic, Emergency & Exit escape lighting is of utmost importance and the quality and performance of the emergency lighting is critical to ensure compliance is always achieved. Emergency and exit lighting also represented a major ongoing maintenance and energy cost for the stadium, and as time passed these costs grew exponentially as products had failed.

The biggest challenge was to firstly achieve 100% compliance and ensure safety for the customers and staff at the stadium and ensure the reliability could be improved and therefore reduce the overall maintenance costs over a 7 year period.

Following the consideration of various options, Honeywell was introduced to the Clevertronics L10 Nanophosphate® Lithium powered lighting range which had just been launch after 12 months of extensive testing. Honeywell Victoria TAM Operations Manager, Matthew Parisi who was managing the project said “The L10 Lithium range is the way of the future. I believe the move away from NiCd batteries will be quite swift as building owners and facility managers become aware of the numerous advantages that L10 product offers. The added advantage of low environmental impact and also less waste through longer replacement intervals also makes it a far more sustainable technology compared to existing practice. In September 2012, the installation of 2,756 Clevertonics L10 Nanophosphate® exit and emergency lighting fittings and a Zoneworks computer monitoring system began and was commisioned in early 2013. Honeywell estimated that switching from traditional Ni-Cd fittings to the Clevertronics L10 Nanophosphate® fittings would see its total energy and maintenance costs for emergency lighting reduced from $1,083,830 to $178,867 over a seven-year period, representing a saving of 83.5% which was beyond expectations before the project began.

Recent results from the site in December 2015 has shown that the L10 Nanophosphate® batteries still have an incredible 95% capacity after 3 years in service which indicates that the batteries are well on track to outlast the 100,000 hour LED’s and the saving estimates previously thought.

Etihad Stadium is well on track to exceed the 83.5% ($905K) in maintenance and energy savings estimated at the time of installation. The L10 Nanophosphate® powered products have created a revolution for facility owners in reducing their maintenance cost by over 80% and most importantly having a site where compliance is easier to manage.