Open Academy

BACKGROUND

Open Academy is a secondary school with academy status located in Norwich. Flick Energy Solutions were approached by Surveyors of Education (S2E) for this fairly new build, however, the academy had energy-burning lighting installed. Although they had smart controls, the school found the lights were still more of a disadvantage.

One of the biggest challenges with Open Academy was the age of the site, being built circa 2010, which meant the academy had missed out on the first phase of LED lighting as they were introduced to build specifications shortly after.

SOLUTION

Open Academy was awarded funding as part of the Phase 1 Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS). The funding was provided by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and delivered by Salix Finance. This allowed us to install over 650 new LED lights for the school which primarily consisted of recessed modular panels, linear batten luminaires, and downlighters with additional emergency features. The benefit of using products manufactured in Birmingham by Flick Lighting was a big factor in securing funding for this project within the parameters.

The lighting installed was much more efficient than previous T8 fixtures, making energy-saving harder to achieve. Open academy is very modern with smart controls, daylight dimming, and occupancy sensors to manage the existing lighting, finding savings was slightly harder to do than a conventional system. In all classrooms, track-suspended lighting was implemented to match the aesthetic of the building.

To ensure we saved energy whilst maintaining the aesthetic of the building, Flick Energy was again able to lean on Flick Lighting to use existing fixtures to keep costs down. The design team at Flick Lighting was able to build bespoke gear trays utilising LED into the original body whilst keeping the existing diffusers, all in line with what the school wanted. Within 6 weeks Flick was able to design and manufacture 500 bespoke gear trays ready to be installed during the summer holiday.