Orange County Convention Center - West Building Dimming System Upgrade Project CD+M Lighting Design Group have recently completed a $1.6M renovation project at the Orange County Convention Center, located in Orlando Florida. The goal of the project was to upgrade the lighting controls system for the 141 meeting rooms and the 1.1 million square feet of exhibit space in the West Building. The Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) currently ranks as the second largest convention center in the United States with 2,100,000 square feet of exhibition space and 480,000 square feet of meeting room space. The OCCC consists of two buildings joined together by a sky-bridge. The West Building, completed in four phases between 1986 and 1996, is located on the south side of International Drive. The North/South Building is located on the north side of International drive and was completed in 2003. Each year, OCCC brings more than 200 events to the Central Florida area. As a result, roughly 1.4 million attendees contribute approximately $1.9 billion to the area's economic impact annually. Additionally over 26,000 jobs are created locally and 1,000 local businesses are supported by events coming to Central Florida. The original 20+ year old lighting system in the West Building was slowly becoming obsolete and unreliable. Repair services and replacement parts were also becoming difficult to find. CD+M Lighting Design Group was hired to evaluate the current lighting controls system and to make recommendations on how to revitalize the system. Thanks to the exceptional maintenance program setup by OCCC technical service supervisor Greg Cyr and his technical staff, we were pleasantly surprised to find the major components of the lighting system were still in good shape. This allows us to eliminate the need to replace the entire system, which would have been very costly and impacted the daily operations and scheduling of the facility for months. Our most difficult decision was whether to install all new control wiring for the (400) new wall stations or to reuse the existing wiring. New wiring would necessitate the need to add carpentry work for demolition and repair of the existing walls and ceiling panels in the (141) meeting rooms. Reusing the existing wiring would require the electrical contractor to "ring-out" and test the individual wire run ends to insure reliability of the wiring before installing the new wall stations. Since the existing lighting system was currently working correctly, including all of the wall stations. The decision was made to reuse the existing control wiring. We were very relieved to learn with only a few minor incidences, reusing the existing wiring turned out to be a successful approach, yielding a $250,000 saving in material and labor cost over installing all new wiring and conduit. The Lutron Grafik 7000 centralized lighting control system was selected to provide the new "front-end" controls. This system allowed for BACnet, DMX512, RS232 and contact closures control interfaces for seamless integration with BMS, fire alarm, occupant sensors and other building management and automation systems. The OCCC has the flexibility to quickly divide large meeting rooms and exhibit halls into smaller more intimate spaces through the use of movable partition wall panels. The Lutron Grafik 7000 system can quickly reconfigure the lighting zones to accommodate these partitioned spaces, while also providing individual lighting controls. The built-in astronomical time allows for scheduled events. As part of the OCCC daily lighting events a series of OFF presets have been programmed to sweep through the facility after hours to insure energy efficiency. The aging control electronics of the existing Strand Lighting (66) CD80 SV dimmer racks and (23) DE90 dimmer cabinets were upgraded with Johnson Systems' CD3000 and DE90 retrofit control electronics. This provided us with a new full-featured controls package, including a unique power saving "stand-by" mode reduces power consumption to less than 1 Watt, allowing for compliance with the International Energy Agency's "One Watt Initiative." We estimate this choice of upgrade was done at 15% of the cost of replacing the all of the dimmer racks and cabinets. Murphy Lighting Systems was added to the team for their integration expertise and their familiarity with the OCCC West Building system. Their scope of work included the inspection, cleaning, repair of the existing dimmer racks and the installation of the new Johnson Systems' CD3000 and DE90 retrofit control modules. One of our key goals was to provide the OCCC technical staff the flexibility to quickly response to any lighting issues from anywhere in the 4 million sqft West Building or from offsite. This was achieved via Dialogic JCT media telephony interface card installed in the main lighting system computer local in the facility's server room. Now the OCCC technical staffs have the ability to control the lighting system 24/7 through the use of four-digit telephone codes, untethered from the main lighting control system computer. For more advance set-ups the staff can also utilize a laptop equipped with the Lutron Control IT web-browser based software to quickly reconfigure the lighting to suit the client's unique lighting requirements in any of the meeting rooms or exhibit halls. OCCC can also provide portable nine-button preset stations to give their clients the ability to create and activate different lighting presets during their event. The new system includes a fiber-optic backbone between major components, along with an extensive Ethernet network. To satisfy the OCCC network standards and compliance issues, the new network installation was supervised by OCCC database administrator, Rick LeBlanc. 
|
