Charter Dura-Bar is a 480,000 sq. ft. steel casting operation. Company leadership had set out to improve the environmental conditions of its facility for the employees and customers. A key component to that undertaking was lighting. Most of the lighting within the foundry had consisted of old mercury vapor and incandescent lighting. Very yellow. And most of the casting area was just too dark. Overall the facility was functioning on 200-400 lux. The goal was to double that output for the safety and wellbeing of the entire team, while improving quality for the customer.
> High heat environment posed a concern
We wanted to go with LEDs due to the energy saving opportunity. But the Wasmer team pointed out that you need to be careful when choosing LED lights for high heat environments. Others may talk about your 10-year savings with LEDs, but you won’t realize that savings if your lights only last a couple of years in those high heat environments. Nobody else pointed that out to us.
> Looking for a lighting partner – a real pro
We wanted somebody who could come in and tell us what we needed to do. Of all the suppliers we spoke with, only Wasmer dug-in to the depth we needed. They presented us with recommended lighting levels for tasks by area. They monitored temperatures in our high heat areas everyday for months via temperature logging devises. Not just at the surface, but up in the ceiling to know precisely what the environmental implications would be for the light fixtures. They installed test lights to make sure they would hold up to the conditions, before we purchased the balance of the lights.
> Needed to minimize facility interruption
We couldn’t really do the whole plant at one time. It would just be too disruptive. So, we broke the plant up into zones. We like to take care of projects like these during our scheduled summer and winter shutdowns. We lined up as much as we could get to for the summer shutdown, which included installing some test lights in the high heat area, so we could verify how they would hold up under real-world operating conditions.

We engineer lighting systems for every environment (high heat, high dust, corrosive vapors, etc) that reduce energy cost, maximize safety, increase employee morale, and increase productivity, resulting in a significant impact to your bottom line – all with turnkey project design and implementation.