December 8, 2015 – The PepsiCo Beverages Canada facility in Winnipeg, Man. says it churns out thousands of beverages each week. Pallet after pallet of product is moved to the warehouse for storage, while employees work behind the scenes in the facility’s office areas. An efficient, clean, and safe work environment that is also environmentally and cost-conscious is necessary to keep operations moving smoothly, the company says.

Recent upgrades—with the assistance of Manitoba Hydro’s Power Smart Commercial Lighting Program—to the facility’s lighting help accomplish that goal.

“It’s like night and day,” says Shawn Klatt, maintenance planning lead at PepsiCo, of the difference the lighting upgrade has made. “There has been significant feedback from both employees and facility visitors commenting on how the overall environment has improved.”

The upgrade involved removing dated T12, T8, and T5 high-output fluorescent fixtures, along with incandescent and halogen bulbs, and replacing them with LED fixtures and LED T8 linear lamps.

PepsiCo used Lithonia IBL24LWD120 LED high-bay lights (270W producing 24,000 lumens), controlled with a graphic wall pod from nLight – Sensor Switch. The wall pod has dimming presets that were used to manually adjust the lighting to various levels depending on time of day and what parts of the facility were being used. One control pod has replaced more than 20 light switches that had to be turned on and off in the production area and warehouse.

“When we’re doing maintenance, we don’t need all the lights on,” says Klatt. “We can turn the lights on over the equipment we’re working on. We can also leave perimeter lights on at 20% for security and safety.”
 
The LED T8 tubes used at PepsiCo were Philips InstantFit lamps 14.5T8/48. They used 16.5W for the system.

Jenkyn’s Electric installed the lights and it took a crew of three to five electricians about 21 weeks over an 18-month time period to complete four separate addresses (buildings that are all connected and part of the same PepsiCo facility).

While the number of fixtures in the facility was reduced by 25%, the lighting in the facility is actually brighter than it was before, the company says.

Another notable upgrade was the installation of occupancy sensors that turn lights on when they sense motion and shut them off when there is no motion for a certain period of time.

The incentive given for the total upgrades in all four building of the PepsiCo Facility, over the past 18 months, was $115,000. The LED lighting upgrades that PepsiCo and Manitoba Hydro Power Smart invested in are estimated to produce 926,000 kWh of annual energy savings, which is the equivalent of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 713 tonnes of CO2e or taking 150 cars off the road for one year.