SLI Newsroom
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Energy saving project in Jyväskylä town in Finland
Date story added: 17/11/04
The Finnish town of Jyväskylä is the place where the Finnish World Rally, “Rally of the Thousand Lakes” (now officially called Neste Rally Finland) takes place every year in August. The town has 82.000 inhabitants and has special expertise in paper manufacturing, information, wellness, energy and environmental technology.
When Sylvania’s SPX Eco Arc lamps were introduced in 1998, the Manager of Street and Park Department Mr. Kari Ström saw excellent opportunities for energy saving in street lighting since the new SPX Eco Arc 98W 1amp can directly replace the existing 125W mercury lamps.
The town of Jyväskylä had over 12.000 lighting points with mercury lamps when the relamping project started. During the project, from 1998 to 2002, 9317 mercury lamps were replaced with SPX Eco Arc lamps. 83% of the lamps were Eco Arc 98W and 13 % Eco Arc 190W lamps. The target of the project was threefold. The first was a major energy saving of 1 600 000 kWh annually. Second came the environmental saving because of 90 % reduced mercury content in the lamps. And last but not least, the safety in the town area was improved by the increased light output of 15% per lighting point. Jyväskylä came out as a winner on all fronts!
However, many of the town’s fixtures were up to 30 years old and therefore had ballasts that were not up to the present specifications. This could have lead to ballast failures, were it not that this phenomenon was taken seriously by Sylvania’s Tienen factory ! Lamp characteristics were changed slightly to cope better with old out of specification ballasts, but Sylvania also suggested to change the oldest fixtures in town. Over 324 of them were changed to new SHP fixtures during this project!
Since the project started the first SPX Eco Arc lamps have gone to the age of replacing (4 years interval) and by now Jyväskylä town has already replaced over 4.000 “second round” SPX Eco Arc lamps. In practise all possible mercury lamps have by now been replaced with Sylvania’s SPX Eco Arc lamps.
