Carbon Neutral

Ken Naasz is design and development VP at The Sign Factory (Kirkland, WA).

The Sign Factory (TSF) was awarded the bid for five, solar-powered monument signs at Eastern Washington University (EWU). The jobs included working at a remote site approximately 300 miles from Seattle with weather extremes – a challenge for solar-powered signage. Also, such projects require sophisticated energy consumption and storage components to operate in darkness. And, among other things, the job required extensive excavation and precast-concrete forming and installation.

The beginning
Founded in 1882 as Eastern Washington State College, EWU offers the state’s best public-education value. It’s now Washington’s fastest-growing public institution, with more than 10,000 students, and EWU’s College of Business and Public Administration ranked in the 2011 edition of The Princeton Review’s annual guidebook, The Best 300 Business Schools. The 300-acre, park-like campus is just 17 miles from Washington’s second largest city, Spokane.

The university’s Board of Trustees included the completion and implementation of the Campus Sustainability Master Plan in its goals for the 2010-2011 academic year. The plan specified five, solar-powered, monument signs. Jacobs Engineering’s Environmental Graphic Design Group (EGDG) worked with the facility’s management team on the pioneering green project. George Lim, EGDG’s national creative director, said an LED-lit sign program would consume no power and require less maintenance than traditional signs running on a power grid.

The completed signs were expected to be “carbon neutral” – 100% solar powered and avoiding typical energy consumption. Using Jacobs’ concept designs, TSF engineered, fabricated and installed the sign system. TSF President Jim Risher said experience keyed successful project execution.

Energy savings
The five signs varied in size from 4 x 8 ft. to 22 x 8 ft. TSF value-added the concept design by adding reverse-channel, LED halo lighting to increase the signs’ impact and readability. Equally important, all of the LED lights are powered by 12VDC. The two sign types that comprise granite towers (erected in tandem with cast, concrete monuments) require just a 3A current, and the complementary, horizontal monument signs draw only 2A of current. All told, the signs required approximately 400 linear ft. of LEDs.

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This unique, proprietary design eliminated the need for conversion to alternating current to gather and store DC voltage from the sun. For accenting lighting in the concrete-tower monument signs, which were identified in the project as “G1” and “G2,” lamps were recessed into the integral concrete structure. For the other monument signs, referenced as “ID1”, “ID2” and “ID3”, we ground-mounted lamps for uplighting.

We designed the signfaces using Delcam’s Artcam 2009 Express and Gerber Scientific Products’ Composer 3.6 software, and fed the design into AXYZ Toolpath for Windows, our AXYZ 5010 6 x 10-ft., CNC flatbed router’s onboard program. We routed the aluminum background panels and created second-surface channel letters with stainless-steel returns internally lit with white LEDs. We welded the signface’s metal components together with a Millermatic 175 220V, wire-feed welder.
 

Rock stars
TSF replaced the columns’ original, cultured-stone design with tons of granite to honor the history and granite-stone architecture of the Normal School, an original campus building that had burned down. The site’s original, granite stones now serve as a monument to the Pillars of Hercules in front of Showalter Hall, at the campus’ traditional entryway.

The TSF team partnered with precast companies and masons to construct the huge signs, steps and footings onsite. We secured all the signs above 3 ft. 6 in. deep, concrete pier footings. They needed a solution to provide the signs with solar power during periods of darkness. The solution required a system that used photovoltaic, solar-array panels to gather and store energy.

The company also contracted with solar design and engineering firms to develop the storage mechanism and configure each unique sign location to overcome the obstacles, such as array-panel placement. One sign site required placing the array panel 150 ft. away from the sign, atop an 18-ft. pole. We did this for aesthetic reasons; we didn’t want the solar array to interfere with the sign’s sightlines.

Because the panel was inaccessible to vehicles, the TSF team attached a three-pane panel the size of a sail to the crane. It was very windy on installation day, and we had to wait for the gusts of wind to subside in order to prevent the rope-tethered solar arrays from sailing away like kites.

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A photo-electric charger, made by Outback Power Technologies, serves as the signs’ nerve center. Mark Robison, president of Rain City Solar (Arlington, WA) said: “It can sense automatically when to turn lights on and off, and even knows when to charge batteries and when to turn lights off when battery power is low.”
TSF attached the solar-array panels to poles and ran rigid conduit from the solar array down to the electrical-panel box and, subsequently, the signs. Each sign had its own charger.
 

Onsite construction
The sites were located in remote campus areas near its current signage. Altogether, the TSF team, along with numerous subcontractors, spent 12 weeks onsite to complete the project. The signs’ new construction required existing signs to be demolished.

The sites ranged in size from 0.25 to 0.67 acres. Each site presented numerous obstacles, such as dirt, tree and shrub removal. Between 100 and 150 tons of precast concrete were delivered and hoisted into place. The project required multiple precast caps, with the largest weighing 10 tons.

The two largest monument signs sit atop three or four steps, which were designed to accentuate their presence as monuments. The subcontractor made stamp impressions, which were completed using silicone molds, formed with the pattern Jacobs specified, to create a stone-like look. The TSF team handled the footings and installed four, 8W Lumascape LED lamps in custom housings with tempered-glass caps in each of the G1 and G2 monuments.

TSF contracted with Olympian Precast and Epic Construction for precast and masonry services. Olympian provided casting for the components which made up the linear portion of the monument signs and tower caps. Each sign includes five precast elements; Epic constructed the columns. Once constructed, Epic applied the granite. The TSF team built, assembled and installed large aluminum-composite, rectangular wraps, built with 3A Composites’ Alucobond® material, to the face of each column.

The “G1” wrap measures 19 ft. tall, and “G2” reaches 15 ft. The large, red wraps provide visual enhancements by covering approximately two-thirds of the column faces to match school colors. On the wraps, we identified the founding year of the original Normal School, 1882, with 1-in.-thick, Steel Art (Boston) aluminum letters. The Alucobond material also provides an accent for the monument and tower capstones.

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Risher said serving as a general contractor and supervising numerous subcontractors on the EWU project proved challenging. “Normally our operations are centralized,” he said. “This project challenged us to turn our procedures upside down while maintaining our standards of excellence. It consumed more resources than we estimated. We even had to fire a contractor for poor work.”

Despite the project’s challenges, it was still very worthwhile to help an institution of higher learning fulfill its mission to provide an environmentally friendly campus. And, probably most satisfying to all parties involved, we delivered the $429,000 project on time and under budget.

Equipment and Materials
Coatings: Grip-Gard®, two-part, self-etching primer, from Akzo Nobel Coatings (Norcross, GA), (770) 662-8464 or www.signfinishes.com; satin-finish, acrylic-polyurethane paint, from Matthews Intl. (Delaware, OH), (800) 323-6593 or https:\corporateportal.ppg.com/na/refinish/matthews

Concrete and Granite: Structural concrete masonry units; natural, stone-cut granite; and precast concrete monoliths, caps and veneers, from Olympian Precast (Redmond, WA), (425) 868-1922 or www.olyprecast.com

Cranes: Dyna-Lift 80-ft. crane, from Dyna-Lift Inc. (Clearwater, FL), (800) 200-0898 or www.dyna-lift.com; Genie 125-ft. lift, from Genie Industries (Redmond, WA), (800) 536-1800 or www.genielift.com; 38-ton crane, from Coast Crane (Spokane, WA), (509) 535-4226 or www.coastcrane.com

LEDs/Lighting: Lumascape LS411LED Omnio Mini and LS793 LED lamps, from Pacific Lamp and Supply (Seattle), (206) 767-5334 or www.pacificlamp.com; Photovoltaic solar electrical components, from Rain City Solar (Arlington, WA), (206) 954-0380 or www.raincitysolarpower.com; red and white, V Series LED modules, from SloanLED (Ventura, CA), (888) 747-4533 or www.sloanled.com

Metal: Recycled-content aluminum sheet, from Ryerson Aluminum (Chicago), (773) 762-2121 or www.ryerson.com; red, 4mm Alucobond® composite material, from 3A Composites (Mooresville, NC), (704) 658-3500 or www.alucobondusa.com; one-in.-thick, waterjet-cut aluminum letters, from Steel Art (Boston), (617) 566-4049 or www.steelartco.com

Router: Dual-head, 6 x 10-ft., flatbed CNC router, from AXYZ Automation Inc. (Burlington, ON, Canada) (800) 361-3408 or www.axyz.com

Software: AXYZ Toolpath for Windows, from AXYZ Automation Inc.; ArtCam Express 2009, from Delcam Inc. (Windsor, ON, Canada), (877) 335-2661 or www.artcam.com; Omega Composer 3.6, from Gerber Scientific Products Inc. (Tolland, CT), (800) 222-7446 or www.gspinc.com

Welder: Millermatic 175 220V wire-feed welder, from Miller Weldmaster Corp. (Navarre, OH), (330) 833-6739 or www.weldmaster.com
 

More About The Sign Factory
The Sign Factory (Kirkland, WA) manufactures, installs and services electric signs. Jim Risher, president, started in the business as a three-year-old who grew up on the floor of his family’s shop, Northwest Neon and Plastic, which was founded in 1964. Over the years, the Risher family purchased several sign companies, including B&B Sign Co. (Missoula, MT).

In the summer of 1988, as Jim drove to Puget Sound from Montana, he envisioned the need for a company that could design and manufacture signs in-house from start to finish. He says the advantage of the turnkey process is brand consistency and competitive pricing while working on multiple locations.

The company offers wholesale production and project coordination regionally and nationally, as well as in Canada. Major customers include Macy’s, Safeway, Bank of America, Supercuts, Starbucks and Wells Fargo, as well as local architects, retailers, property managers and commercial developers.