Modern Building Services

18 MODERN BUILDING SERVICES APRIL 2021 LIGHTING FEATURE LIGHTING A ndre had recently joined amBX but has worked within the lighting industry for over 16 years. He has been involved in LED chip technology, Emergency Lighting, Building Management Systems, Lighting Control and IoT during that time. With all of that industry knowledge, what’s his take on a fundamental question, ‘why is data such an important part of smart lighting?’. It’s a broad question, but one that people within the wider smart city and IoT industries might wonder about. The smart building and lighting markets continue to be driven by the need for energy efficiency and the target of net-zero carbon buildings and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, which has increased the need for flexible and adaptable spaces with overt wellbeing credentials. “We all know that data these days is more valuable than gold. The benefits for building owners as the end-user of a smart lighting solution are improved wellbeing for their occupants, greater energy efficiency, improved insight and saved costs. It is all down to the intelligent actions resulting from the data that is captured; there is no use just capturing that raw data; it is all about what you can do with it and its potential. Data in smart buildings is essential to understanding what your building is doing. When we look at a building, we need to realise how it is working, what spaces are being occupied, and getting feedback on how the building is being used. This is very important for planning and understanding what to do with those spaces and learning what tasks and activities are completed in those spaces - questioning whether it is still fit for purpose? The most important aspect Lighting products and devices will give you information about their status, ‘health’, and when the end of life may come for those products, which is particularly important across many applications but especially emergency lighting. Emergency lighting control is probably, from the smart lighting perspective, one of the most important aspects – providing the ability to know if your building is compliant. Obviously, if your emergency lighting isn’t compliant, that is a severe issue, but the ability to monitor and schedule tests and reports is a brilliant addition to any smart lighting solution. Traditionally, emergency lighting is quite a timely, manual process, so having the ability to change it to something that is automated and easy to schedule is a huge advantage. As we go further forward in smart lighting, one of the most important things to understand is preventative maintenance, we are going to be saving business owners a huge amount of money through what we would term “one-touch maintenance”; in other words, you go to the light fitting once, change the driver or the associated components, and you keep full service in the building, the systemwill continuously monitor the device and then send a notification if there is any fault or predicted maintenance due. This avoids having to go to the product 2 or 3 times to work out Andre Jutel , Business Development Manager of amBX talks about the importance of data in smart lighting Why is data such an important part of smart lighting ?