7. Warradale Community Child Care | solar plus LED lighting

Solar panels on roof of Warradale Community Child Care Centre

Project 7: Warradale Community Child Care Centre, SA

Warradale Community Children’s Centre opened in 1993. Its programs include Child Care for babies and children up to school age and DECD funded Pre-school for 4 year olds. The curriculum is a play based one which incorporates music sessions, a nutrition program, permaculture and sustainability programs.
Contact: wcccc@senet.com.au

Project story…

This was a challenging project despite great cooperation from the child care centre director! We’d almost raised enough funds for the proposed solar loan when SAPN (network providers) brought in new regulations that could have severely affected its cost-effectiveness, so we delayed the project while we collected interval data to assess the outcome. In the meantime we replaced their lighting with LED alternatives in case the solar project had to be shelved. Ultimately we calculated an overall project payback time (solar + LEDs) of around 5 years, and the 6.59kW solar installation went ahead in January 2016.

See what has been achieved so far via the CORENA loan for the Warradale CCC solar PV and LED lighting project

* The MWh figure is the amount of grid electricity avoided by solar electricity generation and energy efficiency measures. The resultant reductions in carbon emissions can be visualised as an equivalent number of average households switching from grid electricity to 100% renewable electricity, noting that the subsequent projects have been avoiding grid electricity for less time than the original project.

Note: The install date shown above is adjusted to take into account the difference between the install dates of the two parts of this project. The LED lighting was actually installed on 12/10/15, and the solar panels on 11/01/16. You can see the solar output component of this project online at https://monitoringpublic.solaredge.com/solaredge-web/p/kiosk?guid=9575422c-971c-426c-8601-971f3a7026e7

This project has been fully funded- Thank you!

Progress bar showing fully funded via $9,035.84 in new donations and $5,950.16 in loan repayments

Honour roll

Thanks to all the people who have donated to this project.

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Status: Funded project – loan repayment completed
Loan amount: $14,986
Loan repayments: $761/quarter

Work details

5kW solar installation:
– 22 x Jinko JKMS260P (5.72kW peak) Solar High performance panels and SolarEdge Optimizers
– 1x SE5K-Euro 3ph SolarEdge string inverter ($10,090)
3-phase input-output meter ($615)
Timer for hot water heater ($440)
Replacement of 61 x 36W fluorescent lamps to 18W VIBE LED lamps ($3,841)
Total cost: $14,986
Expected savings: $3,044/year, 12,260kWh/year

Reduction in carbon emissions/yr: Equivalent to 2.21 average households using renewable electricity instead of grid electricity