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Cedar Cliff Gymnasium Lighting Upgrade

Gym lighting is something a district lives with long past the point of liking it. The fixtures are high up, relamping means a lift and a closed gym, and the room is essentially either on or off. Cedar Cliff Schools replaced the lot in one project at its Cedarville, Ohio campus — 56 fixtures in the high school gym and 24 in the middle school gym.

The old fixtures came out and were disposed of, ballasts and bulbs included, and LED linear high bays went up in their place. Every one carries a lens and a wire guard, which in a gymnasium is not an accessory. The district approved the fixture selection before it was ordered, so what went in was what the people who use the rooms had signed off on.

The other half of the contract is administrative. Prodigy prepared the DP&L utility rebate paperwork on the district's behalf as a line in the scope of work. A rebate on a lighting retrofit is real money to a district, and it is also a form, a deadline and a set of fixture specifications that have to match what is actually hanging in the room. Writing it into the contract is how it gets claimed rather than discussed.

The result is two rooms on one fixture type, with lenses and guards suited to what happens in them, and a rebate submitted by the people who know what was installed. The work was procured under the authority of Ohio Revised Code Section 9.48.

New LED fixtures over the Cedar Cliff gymnasium with championship banners

Cedar Cliff gym from center court after the lighting upgrade

Upgraded gymnasium lighting above the student section at Cedar Cliff

Technical Discussion

Who files the utility rebate

Every LED retrofit proposal a district sees includes a rebate line, and the rebate is often what makes the arithmetic work. It is also the only part of the project with nobody obviously assigned to it. The fixtures have an installer. The old ballasts and bulbs have a hauler. The rebate has a utility program with its own rules and deadlines and, in most districts, a shared assumption that somebody else is taking care of it.

This contract assigns it. Preparing the DP&L rebate paperwork on the district's behalf sits in the scope of work next to the 56 fixtures in the high school gym and the 24 in the middle school gym. That matters more than it sounds, because a utility program pays against the specific fixture installed rather than against a category, and the party who can document that is the party that specified, ordered and hung it — not the treasurer's office reading an invoice three months later.

Timing matters as much as documentation. Rebate budgets are annual and they close when they are spent. A claim assembled after the fact by a district reconstructing what went in is the claim that misses; a claim filed by the contractor at the time of installation is filed while the submittals are still on the truck.

The second decision worth naming is that the fixtures were customer-approved before purchase. In a gym that is a lighting-quality question — uniformity across a court, glare from the bleachers, and the lenses and wire guards all 80 fixtures carry, because a gymnasium fixture spends its life inside the range of a volleyball. It is also a rebate question, since approving the fixture is approving the figure the rebate is calculated on.

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