The indoor galleries and outdoor exhibits at the Mennonite Heritage Village will be a lot brighter now thanks to a Community Places Grant.

Executive Director Barry Dyck says their main building is 27 years old and along with that is some old lighting as well. He says all their lighting has been replaced to LED lighting through Manitoba Hydro’s Power Smart program.

"We’ve been awarded $18,036 for use in converting a whole bunch of old lighting systems to LED. We have been working on this project for quite some time and we’ve acquired a variety of different funding from different sources including the Community Places grant. The project is about just over $40,000 in total."

Dyck notes they anticipate this will save them quite a bit on energy bills in the long run as well.

"So our main galleries had about 100 lighting units in them that have all been replaced with LED’s. We had a variety of lights outside, we have very bright yard lights for security reasons. We had I think 11,000 watt bulbs out there and they’ve been replaced with LED’s equivalent of about 300 watts so there’s a lot less power consumption. Two of our outdoor exhibits, the tractor exhibit and the transportation exhibit have also both been refitted with LED lighting so we anticipate a substantial saving in our energy bill."

Along with a lower energy bill, Dyck says this will be low maintenance now as well. He adds the project was started in late October or early November and was completed last week.