Southern Container | Houston, TX

XtraLight LED lighting upgrades helps improve Southern Container's production facility by increasing visibility, reducing maintenance costs, and achieving greater energy savings.

The Opportunity

Southern Container, located in Houston, Texas, has been an innovative manufacturer of custom packaging solutions for decades. Over those years, they’ve helped hundreds of companies market their products effectively while keeping them protected. With value-added capabilities ranging from design, to manufacturing, and handling logistics, they have been committed to helping their customers succeed through automation and innovation.

So it was no surprise that part of that innovation was setting goals to improve energy-efficiency for their facilities. By creating a more productive environment for their employees and saving on energy costs, Southern Container can go even further with their commitment to saving their customers more money long term. Since their original installation, multiple metal halide HID fixtures had suffered from degraded lighting performance, or had completely malfunctioned, leading to an unpredictable maintenance nightmare. Most importantly, the light levels in many of the areas were inconsistent, or even non-existent, as the fixtures approached their end of life. The Southern Container team turned to XtraLight to update the existing lighting with economical, smart LED lighting for the improved performance and energy savings they were looking for.

The new XtraLight LED lighting upgrade helped establish a safe, productive working environment for both Southern Container employees and visitors.

The Solution

The small quantity of lighting fixtures that were active stayed on most of the day, even when there wasn’t any activity going on in the production areas or freight docks. Because of that, money was being spent on virtually wasted energy annually. They needed “smart” lighting that knew when to turn on fully when needed and either dim down or turn off when there was no activity in the area after a specified time. To meet this requirement, Southern Container chose XtraLight’s LEB Blade, a low profile LED high bay luminaire with integrated occupancy sensors and emergency back-up. In addition to improving the lighting levels and uniformity, the total number of lighting fixtures being utilized were reduced overall. The integrated occupancy sensors now quickly turn on with any movement and turn off with an adjustable timing sensor that can be adjusted by operational personnel. This feature alone will assist in delivering a significant impact on annual energy savings.

With integrated occupancy sensors, the new LED high bay lighting would only be active when they sense movement in pre-determined areas. This creates an even larger reduction in the amount of energy that’s used in the facility.

Benefits

With the new lighting installed, Southern Container has taken steps to create one of the safest and most environmentally sustainable work places in their industry. No longer will they have to worry about constantly maintaining poor lighting conditions in the facility or have to stop operations to deal with lighting outages. With the confidence of having XtraLight LED products backed by a 10 year warranty, Southern Container can look forward to keeping employees more productive instead of managing lighting issues for quite a while. The new LED lighting solution will provide a combined annual energy and maintenance savings of over $19,000. To further increase the benefits, XtraLight assisted in identifying and obtaining a utility rebate for the project totaling almost $9,000.

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