Ex-NASCAR Driver Discovers Many Benefits of LED Lighting
Legendary NASCAR driver, owner, and businessman extraordinaire, Richard Petty, has discovered the benefits of LED and his whole team is loving it!
The 100,000 square foot Petty’s Garage, illuminated by LED troffers and luminaires. Specializing in restoring high-performance vehicles, the garage was retrofitted with LED lighting, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in energy use.
Petty’s record-breaking racing career was only the first of many successful business ventures, one of his most recent being Petty’s Garage. In 2008, Richard was ambitiously looking for a way to continue to win both on and off the track. He found it when he opened Petty’s Garage, his own high-performance speed shop. Now car aficionados and NASCAR fans alike could benefit from the professionalism and skills of the King’s own crew.
The shop’s motto, “If you can dream it, we can build it” is taken very seriously by every dedicated professional involved in the operation and the equipment chosen to outfit the shop shows it. Everything must be state of the art to provide the best for their clients, and until recently the lighting wasn’t even close. Like many garages and automobile shop facilities, the standard lighting was lacking, to say the least. Work lights hanging over engines and flashlights hanging out of mechanic’s mouths were common sights around the shop.
Petty’s Garage worked with Greenleaf Energy Solutions to devise a better plan. Greenleaf confidently recommended LED lighting solutions from Cree and the upgrades began. When it was all said and done, Greenleaf had installed over 700 LED lights throughout the Petty’s Garage complex. The installation is the first of a two-part project and included the main production area of the facility as well as many other areas throughout. Both troffers and linear luminaries were used, depending on which suited the installation location and lighting requirements for the area. When completed, it was estimated that the garage will save 50 percent of its former energy use for lighting, and was even able to reduce the number of fixtures in the building by 10 percent. The most impressive part of this retrofit has been the reactions of the people who experience it every day, the staff at Petty’s Garage.
Paint specialist Bunk Long puts it in simple terms: “With the kind of work we do, good lighting is everything; these lights are just tremendously better than what we had before.”
And Richard Petty himself is pretty impressed with the improvements the LED lights have made around the garage. When the Cree lights were installed, I said, “Man, why hadn’t we done this before? Once we get through with a car now,” he says, “it looks like a brand-new shiny penny.”
Petty and his crew are enjoying the low-maintenance features of the LED lights, too. In the past when lights burned out, they would often go unchanged because of the aggravation that comes with changing bulbs. The new Cree LED lights are covered by a ten-year warranty. Imagine that: ten years without dragging out a forklift to change a light bulb. That would be a maintenance man’s dream. And Richard Petty is happy about it too, “Our business here is to redo cars, not redo buildings and lights, so the more time I spend on the car and less on the lights, the better I’m liking it.”
The Garage is already making plans for stage two of the lighting improvements to the complex. Security, floodlights and even streetlights will soon be replaced with LED fixtures that provide better quality, more efficient, light.
Overall, Richard Petty and the staff at Petty’s Garage are beyond thrilled with the quality and quantity of light that their new Cree LED lights provide for them. The statement that says it best is a quote from Mr. Petty himself, “There’s really only one word to describe these lights: Wow! “
To read this article, in its entirety, you can view it here.
Interested in LED lighting for your business? Make sure you contact USIlluminations to find out all of the options you have!
