San Diego
Specialty Lighting

Case study  ·  Sports venue  ·  Prevailing wage

130 luminaires out.
107 in. Around a live MLB season.

Full RGBW luminaire replacement across the upper deck canopy and the sports light positions at Petco Park, under contract to Padres, L.P. Signify / Color Kinetics Reach Elite on Data Enabler Pro gen3 infrastructure, as the C-10 licensed electrical contractor — sequenced around a working ballpark rather than around us.

At a glance

Petco Park

Owner
Padres, L.P. — owner of Petco Park
Our role
C-10 licensed electrical contractor — work performed by both owners
Scope 1
Upper deck canopy — 26 Reach Elite High Output, 8 Data Enabler Pro G3, all new 1" Sealtite, wiring, boxes and terminations
Scope 2
Sports light positions — removal of 130 existing Compact Reach luminaires, up to 81 Reach Elite High Punch, new Data Enabler Pro G3
Materials
Luminaires and data enablers furnished direct to owner by Signify / Color Kinetics under manufacturer warranty replacement
Labor
Prevailing wage
Constraint
Scheduled around Padres games and events — no interruption to venue operations
Term
Mobilized April 2026; extended through August 2026
Status
In progress

The problem

A ballpark doesn't close for a lighting upgrade.

Pulling 130 luminaires off a ballpark and putting 107 back is not technically exotic. Doing it in a venue hosting a Major League Baseball season, without a single dark night or a fixture left half-mounted when the gates open, is where most of the difficulty lives.

Three constraints shaped everything about how this job was planned:

  • Access windows are short and non-negotiable. Work happens between home stands and around events, not on a contractor's preferred sequence.
  • The new fixtures don't share the old mounting pattern. Existing positions were built around the previous generation of Compact Reach luminaires, at hole spacings the Reach Elite bodies don't match.
  • Nothing can be left in an unsafe or unfinished state. Every window has to end with the section restored, whether or not the scope for that window is complete.

A contractor who plans this like a normal retrofit discovers the problem on the first turnover. We planned it as a sequence of self-contained sections from the start.

Fixture selection

Two Reach Elite variants, chosen by position.

The upper deck canopy and the sports light positions are not the same optical problem, and specifying one fixture for both would have compromised one of them.

26 Reach Elite High Output went to the upper deck canopy, where broader coverage and total lumens matter more than tight beam control. Up to 81 Reach Elite High Punch — long-throw instruments with a tight native beam — went beneath the sports lighters, where a wider fixture would spill light where it isn't wanted and lose intensity where it is.

All luminaires and data enablers are furnished direct to the owner by Signify / Color Kinetics under a manufacturer warranty replacement program, following previous-generation fixture malfunctions. Our contract is the electrical scope, not the hardware.

Both are IP66 wet-location rated with die-cast aluminum housings, corrosion resistance verified to ASTM B117, and a 5G vibration rating — which matters more in a stadium than most people assume, given what a full house does to a structure.

Both are also RGBW, so the same fixtures that light the seating bowl for a game can run team colors, a home-run sequence, or a holiday scene without a second system bolted alongside.

Mounting

The bracket is the project.

On a venue retrofit, the fixture is a catalog item and the mounting is the engineering. New luminaires rarely share a hole pattern with what they replace — so either the structure changes, or the attachment method does.

The outgoing Compact Reach bodies mount on a 692 mm span with four 13.5 mm holes. The incoming Reach Elite units use a 500 mm pattern with 14 mm holes and a 298 mm minimum spacing. Those don't line up, and finding that out on a lift at 11pm is the expensive version.

So we documented both mounting-hole geometries against each other before a single fixture came off the building, and specified 304 stainless steel beam clamps for the Reach Elite installations with galvanized hardware throughout — attachment that works with the structure that's there rather than requiring it to be modified. Structural coring is explicitly outside our scope; where an existing mounting plate isn't sound, that's a change order rather than a surprise.

Data infrastructure

Getting the signal from the rack to the fixture.

A hundred-plus addressable luminaires are only as good as the path the data takes to reach them. Our scope here is the physical control layer — the enablers, the pathway, and the intercept from the venue's existing racks.

  • Eight Data Enabler Pro gen3 units at the upper deck canopy, plus new units at the sports light positions
  • Existing data enablers removed and repurposed rather than scrapped
  • Data signal intercepted at the racks and run out to the enablers
  • All new 1" Sealtite, wiring, boxes and terminations; 10 AWG stranded THHN on lighting circuits
  • Outdoor-rated Cat 6 throughout for data
  • Existing leader cables reused where sound, with connectors cleared before landing on the Reach Elite bodies

Luminaire addressing on this project takes place at Padres Engineering, and ETC Mosaic programming sits with the venue — a division of scope we'd rather state plainly than blur. What we own is that every fixture is powered, reachable from the rack, and ready to address.

Compliance

Prevailing wage, handled in-house.

Labor on this project is prevailing wage, administered in-house by our CCO rather than outsourced — weekly certified payroll, eCPR filing, fringe benefit compliance, and apprenticeship notices. All work is performed to NEC and City of San Diego code.

The work on this contract is performed by the owners. On a venue with this profile that isn't a cost decision — the work is at height, at night, on a compressed schedule, in a structure full of people the following afternoon, and the person making the call on a seized fastener at 11pm is the person who signed the contract.

  • CSLB C-10 #1139780 · DIR #2000013156
  • Certified payroll and eCPR filing
  • DAS-140 / DAS-142 apprenticeship compliance
  • OSHA-trained, aerial lift certified, fall protection program
  • Daily safety equipment checks; barricades, fencing and signage coordinated with venue staff
  • All clean-up, waste and recycling disposal handled by SDSL per City requirements

Why it went to us

One contractor held the electrical scope end to end.

A stadium lighting retrofit usually gets divided: an electrical contractor for the power, a manufacturer's startup tech for the controls, and a general contractor coordinating between them. Every seam in that arrangement is a place for the schedule to fail, and on a venue with fixed access windows, a failed schedule is a season.

SDSL held the removal, the infrastructure, the installation, the mounting method and the data pathway under one C-10 license — and both owners performed the work themselves. One number to call, and the person who answered it was the person on the lift.

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