Lighting Control Design — Energy effiency and savings

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By Colin Ramsden, November 2008.

Tasked with the challenge of improving energy efficiency in the public (house) areas of an existing (legacy) lighting installation for a large local shopping centre (Erina Fair — Central Coast, NSW, Australia), I found a lighting installation design which had been mostly ignored since it was first designed back in 1982.

The main building complex mostly consisted of several long malls with many thousands of HID (High Intensity Discharge) lights for general lighting. Accent lighting for shop frontages, signage, and uplighting for features (indoor plants and trees, columns, awnings) were provided by incandescant and fluorescant direction spotlights. Amenities and access passageways were also lit by incandescant and fluorescant lighting.

Each mall area was switched in groups:

• Mall (trading)
• Accent
• Security
• Cleaning
• Exterior

The groupings were such that all groups were turned ON during trading hours, with the Mall and Accent groups turned OFF outside of trading hours. Only the Security lighting remained ON 24/7. These groups were remotely controlled by a BMS (Building Management System) and able to be overridden locally at the local electrical DB (Distribution Board) for each mall area.

Now from the point of view of the designing electrical engineer back in the early 80's, this was an advanced design, providing flexibility and automated control, quite adequate and acceptable for the period. It divided the building into mall areas, and provided individual control for activity-based lighting in each mall.

However, its finite control was limited to the group level in each mall, which meant that every light in the group for the whole mall was either ON or OFF together, however, the malls have since become rather long and large. There was no flexibility in this design for the concept of extended late-night trading, where only a few of the tenants in the mall (such as the large retailers and supermarkets) would remain open long after the numerous smaller shop-keepers and stall-holders had closed for the day.

Thus was the conundrum created, where a majority of the mall remained fully lit in order to provide only passing access to extended-hour shoppers.

 

 

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