News

July 12, 2010

Case Study: Mustard Maker G.S. Dunn Installs Dialight Durosite™ LED High Bay Fixtures

Mustard Maker G.S. Dunn Saves Energy, Improves Quality Assurance with Dialight Durosite LED High Bay Fixtures Click here to read the full case study At the G.S. Dunn quality control and inspection facility in Hamilton, Ontario, light quality and accuracy is a primary concern to ensure the company™s dry mustard products meet its stringent standards. As part of a strategic plan to optimize visibility and reduce energy consumption, the company looked to its current high-wattage metal halide lighting system as a potential area for improvement. Recently, the company replaced 18 of its 450W metal halide units with Dialight™s high-efficiency DuroSite LED High Bay fixtures and gained not only superior color rendering, but also significant cost and energy savings to align with the company™s fiscal and sustainability goals. Quality from the Ground Up As the market leader in producing and supplying dry mustard products since 1867, G.S. Dunn has built a worldwide reputation for delivering the finest dry milled mustard products to some of the most notable names in the food industry. To ensure uncompromising quality, the company™s stringent quality inspection process requires adequate lighting for optimum visibility. To achieve the visibility needed, the company had installed 18 powerful 450-watt fixtures in the inspection facility, with each actually consuming somewhere around 540 watts of energy to run the light and the ballast. Because of the light degradation over the life of the fixtures, ensuring optimum light quality for thorough product inspection was an ongoing challenge. In addition to light quality issues, the powerful fixtures were expensive to operate and maintain. Not only were bulb changes a costly annual occurrence, at $100 per hour in addition to the cost of the bulbs, but the company had resorted to leaving the energy-sucking lights on 24 hours a day when a third shift was needed to meet production demands. With the metal halide™s slow warm-up period, leaving the lights on proved more operationally efficient than waiting around for the lights to warm up.