McWong International teamed with project partners Contemporary Energy Solutions, Pentalux, and Silvair to deploy a large TruBlu™ control network at Yamaha Motors’ midwestern distribution center, located in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. The SIG-qualified TruBlu mesh control network consists of 320 nodes and 40 control zones encompassing the 175,000 ft2 facility, and estimated energy savings exceed 250,000 kWh.
Yamaha’s Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin facility provides a geographically central location for the final manufacture, packaging and distribution of a wide range of powersports equipment, including ATVs, snowmobiles, watercraft, Side-by-Side vehicles, and motorcycles. The facility includes rack and aisleway storage, open assembly and packaging areas and administrative spaces. The project team migrated from legacy light sources to LED lighting, selecting 2-foot linear high bay LED fixtures with a 5000k color temperature to replace the existing T5HO fixtures. Then, to maximize flexibility, they installed a TruBlu integrated occupancy sensor/control module on each fixture. This enabled the company to create and adjust control zones dynamically to accommodate any adjustments across the distribution center itself. While currently the facility is made up of approximately 40% aisleway and rack storage, with the remaining 60% devoted to open areas, the need for future reconfiguration was a possibility the team wanted to accommodate.
While the team could design the project via the TruBlu web-based portal, groups configured, they ended up doing much of the design and configuration from the TruBlu smartphone app while on the facility floor. As Pentalux controls designer Romano Vlastelica noted, “Having the smartphone app made it easy for us to create some preliminary control scenarios to test and share with the Yamaha facilities team. We were able to customize the scenario more precisely in a matter of minutes.” McWong project lead Anthony Savalle added, “We were able to commission the entire project in less than a half-day!”
Completed in December 2019, the project is anticipated to save the facility nearly 250,000 kWh, for a cost savings of $32,415 annually. The team projects that approximately 25% of this total savings is attributable to the mesh control network.
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