We send out a Press Release announcing our successful bid, which is one of only three throughout Suffolk that were approved.

The reduction in energy use will allow us to spend more money on providing our core activities and we are extremely grateful for this Lottery funding from Sport England.

In addition we will be contributing towards making Suffolk "the Greenest County".

We have returned all the acceptance documentation to Sport England.

At the Trustees Meeting, the Trustees reviewed all the submitted Tenders and appointed Stream Engineering to carry out the work.  The Trustee taking the lead on this initiative is Dennis Morley.

We have just heard that we have been successful in our funding application and have been granted the full amount of £39,213 - but we are not allowed to tell anybody until after the press embargo date of 24th January, 2013.  What a great Christmas present!

We have re-written our Application and had it reviewed and have now submitted it for Round 3.

We hear that we have been unsuccessful in our Application for Round 2, however Sport England give us a lot of guidance regarding how to better present our case.

We submit our funding application to replace all the lighting and switches/sensors throughout the Centre.

The Centre is very expensive to run in terms of electricity use (2010/2011 cost us £14,269 and 2011/2012 cost us £16,651) and a major part of that is the lighting.  As an example, the Sports Hall alone uses 150 fluorescent tubes, which only last a matter of a few months and replacing them necessitates the hire of a scissor lift plus the cost of the bulbs, plus 2 members of staff – and we do this twice a year.  We also have some very inefficient circuits inasmuch as (for example) the downstairs changing rooms are only used for about 3 or 4 hours per week, however because they are on the same lighting circuit as the toilets, these changing rooms are lit for eighteen hours per day, seven days per week.

Our funding application is for the complete replacement of all the existing lights throughout the Centre to LED bulbs and smart sensors, so that they are only lit when required.  The life span of an LED bulb is in the region of 50,000 hours, compared to 8,000 hours of a fluorescent tube.  LED uses only 21W compared to 40W of a fluorescent tube.  Also LED has low CO2 emission, does not suffer from burn-out failure, flicker, buzzing and is instant-on, without requiring any light up time.

On top of this we also estimate that we can replace the 150 fluorescent tubes in the Sports Hall with only 20 LED lights to achieve the same lux.  For those of you who want to know more about the comparison from an independent site, see here.