How to Master the Basics of Smart Lighting for Commercial and Industrial Spaces

Think smart lighting systems are only for high-end fantasy homes of the future? Think again: Commercial, industrial and city buildings make up the lion’s share of the smart lighting market, implementing 60% of projects worldwide. New innovations in lighting controls have opened up a new area of accessibility for both retrofits and new construction projects. Whether you’re illuminating a school, hospital, retail space or office, there are many factors you should consider when choosing the right lighting control system for your building:

• Cost-effectiveness: It’s no secret that energy-efficient lighting reduces skyrocketing energy bills. However, it’s also important that its implementation is sensitive to your design budget.
• Upgradeability: Don’t get locked into a stagnant system. The right controls can integrate with budding technologies and evolve to meet the changing the needs of your occupants.
• Code compliance: Municipal building codes and state-selected guidelines like the International Conservation Code can impact future renovation projects. By teaming up with the right lighting controls partner, you can feel confident that your system never falls behind regulatory requirements.

Selecting the right lighting options for your commercial or industrial floor plan has significant benefits. Efficient lighting reduces profit-draining energy consumption and creates a more welcoming, comfortable, and productive environment for tenants and visitors.

3 Steps for Selecting the Optimal Lighting Controls for Your Building

Not every space is alike. Warehouse lighting has a unique list of needs that sets it apart from fixtures in a retail dressing room, just as a private office checks different boxes than a shared open plan. Using this simple guide, you can select the best lighting controls for the specific layout you have today, without inhibiting your ability to scale up tomorrow. Here are three helpful steps to achieving the optimal design of an automated lighting environment for your unique space.

1. Choose single fixtures that are plug-and-play
Looking for a simple way to control the energy usage of larger spaces like warehouses and manufacturing facilities? Take the first step towards building your intelligent lighting environment with Daintree One. Preloaded with out-of-the-box energy-saving features like daylight and occupancy sensors, fixtures automatically adjust luminance depending on incoming natural light. Plus, with auto-off features, there’s no need for maintenance or cleaning staff to double-check switches at the end of the day.

2. Customize your lighting effects with intuitive basic controls
Need more flexibility and customization? Daintree EZ Connect lets you join adjacent fixtures together to curate the perfect ambiance for any building. Instead of blasting weary eyes with overpowered LEDs no matter the time of day, you can limit brightness to create a soothing tone that increases productivity and morale.

Just like an orchestra conductor tempers the woodwinds or ignites a flurry of brass, Daintree EZ Connect puts you on the podium of a distributed system of wirelessly enabled fixtures. With a few quick taps on the companion app, you’re in charge of a symphony of lighting, where you can divide fixtures into different sections known as zones.

Lights controlled via the Daintree EZ Connect system can communicate with each other directly for a more coordinated zonal effect. That means lights in an open office space can work together and adjust brightness levels based on occupancy. Similarly, in areas such as bathrooms or parking garages, you can set the lights to immediately turn on at full brightness for convenience and safety. But that same building could set the lights in private offices to turn on gradually, allowing the occupant time to adjust. Whether you’re dealing with long hallways, large cafeteria spaces, or smaller huddle rooms, you can commission zones, set the lighting levels your inhabitants prefer, and then let the system do the rest.

3. Advanced controls at your fingertips
Daintree Networked puts the power of a fully automated facility in the palm of your hand. You’re at the helm of a comprehensive portfolio of amenities that can expand into areas beyond lighting, such as water heaters, various building loads and thermostats. By combining networked controls with integrated sensors, Daintree Networked allows for full control of your entire building on one visual, web-based platform, ensuring every system runs as efficiently as possible. In fact, facilities that implement the full suite of Daintree controls realize up to 50% additional energy savings across lighting, plug load, and fans.

This smart tech lighting controls system can be utilized as a base IoT infrastructure that captures valuable data to help improve the efficiency of a buildings’ lighting fixtures and its energy consumption, as well as increase the productivity of workers and employees. Additional sensing and control elements can be added over time to ensure and expand on future value for the customer.

How does Daintree Networked integrate with these other devices? Using Zigbee protocol: a technology that serves as a common language to connect different building automated systems. Zigbee breaks down the barriers between sensors, allowing you to pair your lighting sensors with other Daintree systems like HVAC and water heater controls. By leveraging this specialized technology translator, you can even link devices from different vendors to create your own unique smart ecosystem—and control it from one centralized Daintree Networked hub.

Zigbee works by creating a mesh network, where each sensor propagates the signal to encourage cross-communication between devices over large distances. This provides the ideal foundation for the Internet of Things, allowing you to connect multiple devices to the Daintree system.

The possibilities for this expanded IoT infrastructure are endless. Offices can deploy productivity tools that identify open meeting rooms and change schedules on-the-fly, so employees never waste time looking for a workspace. Industrial facilities can use asset tracking or wayfinding apps to monitor the location of high-value assets and make it easier for workers to find what they need. All types of spaces can even use these controls for people counting (to comply with occupancy limits) and heat mapping, which identifies the most populated areas in a space, enabling you to achieve anything from optimizing cleaning schedules to more strategic retail displays.

Upgrading your lighting environment to a smart system might sound like a tall order. But with Daintree, you can build towards the future with a system that not only works for you today, but also can scale up to meet the needs of tomorrow. The infrastructure stays the same regardless of whether you’re managing one space on the inside or on the outside of an entire campus, and you can easily add on to the system as new needs make themselves known.