When his local footy club needed a lighting overhaul, Mat Walker made sure he got the job done right. Jacob Harris shines a light on the situation.

When the Korumburra Bena Football Netball Club needed a $308,000 lighting upgrade, the club committee decided the best bet was to hire one of their own. Mat Walker of Walker Electrical Contracting is a life member, sponsor, senior player and junior coach at the club and as such was well placed to achieve a great outcome for everyone involved.

“The concept for the lighting project actually started about five years earlier. One of the existing underground cables to a light tower had shorted out and, being a mineral insulated metal sheathed (MIMS) cable that was buried under concrete and asphalt, repairing it was going to be extremely costly.

Instead made a three phase lead and plugged the tower into an outlet 40m away. This was meant to be a temporary fix but we ended up using it for about four years,” says Mat.

This setup provided the football oval with a dim 20lux at the brightest point. Add the fact the netballers had no outdoor lights whatsoever, and there was a compelling argument for a complete overhaul of the club’s lighting.

Unfortunately, the club committee didn’t think they could find the resources to fund the whole project, so Mat advised them that the best way forward was to install new infrastructure to the damaged pole and then have further lights added to it when funds became available down the track.

But when the committee began looking into avenues for funding, they met South Gippsland Shire’s grants officer Penni Ellicott, who suggested the club had a reasonable chance of getting the whole project done at once.

Walker Electrical sought the advice of Pierlite lighting and a lighting layout was put together. Then, after securing funding from the state government, the local shire and the club itself, the project was put out to tender.

“We had already invested a lot of time and effort in the project, so we were really keen to gain the successful tender,” says Mat.

They got it alright but that was just the beginning: this was going to be a big job for a small team.

“Because this was the first project of its kind that we had undertaken, the prospect was undeniably daunting. This was compounded by the fact that when you’re working in a small town everybody is watching your every move,” says Mat.

“I was confident I had the electrical knowledge and the team to get the job done. The biggest challenge was going to be managing the project while running our day-to-day business.”

The project included: 2 x hinged 12m netball towers; two 25m and two 30m football towers (there was an embankment on one side of the grounds so two different sized poles were used to achieve a uniform height of 30m); four one kw Pierlite Optivision floodlights; 40 two kw Pierlite Optivision floodlights; a mains upgrade of 250 amps three phase; a new group metering and a CT chamber; and a new three phase netball court supply.

Mat’s team ran a 10-pair control cable to each tower to enable individual control of light tower switching, and installed control cabinets at the base of each tower for the lighting control gear. This greatly improved accessibility for future maintenance tasks, as well as providing access to mount general use power outlets.

A programmable logic controller (PLC) was installed to achieve greater switching control, and to achieve the three stages of lumen control (50lux, 100lux and 200lux) the project required. Walker Electrical also had the lights run through PLC timers to avoid massive inrush currents. Now, if all the switches are turned on at once the lights will progressively run through their sequence and turn on systematically.

“We encountered some unique challenges on the job,” says Mat.

“The heights you have to climb to when aiming the lights take a bit of getting used to. Also, because the ground is a public venue, we had to allow for public access throughout the job. This meant barricading the areas we were working on, and closing all the gates during the erection of the towers.”

The job was the biggest ever undertaken by Walker Electrical Contracting and got Mat and his team listed as finalists in NECA’s Victorian Excellence Awards. But the bright lights of Korumburra haven’t changed things too much down at Walker Electrical, Matt’s just glad they could help their local club and add another satisfied customer to their list in the process.

“Our company has changed only in the valuable experience and confidence gained from the project. We are still just a small firm of six trying to the best job we can – no matter what size the job.”