Welcome to WECC Talk
Are you shutting off every other fixture in your plant to save money?
Are you looking for ways to offset rising material, transportation and operating costs at your plant without outsourcing to other countries? Lighting is one operational expense that is often overlooked as a way of increasing cost- and energy-saving opportunities. Did you know that lighting accounts for 38% or more of the cost for running a building? Or that only 3% of all the buildings in the world and 7% of all the buildings in the U.S. have intelligent lighting control?
Many industrial plants waste lots of lighting energy by over-lighting work areas and overpowering HID and fluorescent lamp fixtures. For example, most fluorescent lights are powered by a “dumb” ballast, and with HID lighting, plants often have fixtures installed on 12-foot centers although they can probably accomplish the necessary brightness on 20-foot centers. In both cases, the lamps are usually being overpowered and are on at full brightness 100 percent of the time, driving up energy costs. Most often, facility managers choose the “simple” solution of shutting down every other row of lights to cut energy usage (and light) by 50 percent. But this doesn’t optimize lighting for the task at hand and it doesn’t address the other issues affecting each fixture’s energy usage. For many reasons, this rarely accomplishes the savings goals and it definitely doesn’t meet workers’ safety and productivity expectations.
Fortunately, there is a way for operations managers to achieve significant savings on lighting costs—savings that is repeatable and that will actually contribute to the bottom line. The solution is to control each lighting fixture with an efficient lighting controller and solid-state dimming ballast. This solution won’t force you to shut down the plant to install new versions of the same type of lighting fixture and you won’t have to change the lighting technology that you already have. This method will, however, let you control your lighting and optimize it as required in all areas of your facility.
A typical warehouse or manufacturing facility may have hundreds or thousands of lighting fixtures, depending on square footage. A state-of-the-art distributed lighting control system can optimize lighting for each task while providing for a reduction in energy usage at each lighting fixture. With a distributed lighting control system, a plant or warehouse can save up to 75 percent in lighting energy usage and costs by optimizing light output.
With distributed lighting control technology, you can program and schedule lighting by task, by room, by zone, by building and by time of day to optimize light output, minimize energy usage and maximize the life of the lamp and ballast. It allows for more productive workflow, significant savings from reduced lighting energy costs, and measurable energy savings on a continuous basis.
Are you still shutting off half your lights to save money? Isn’t it time to find a better way?
Why did I create a lighting control system?
I started solving the lighting control issue because they came to me to do so. If an air-conditioning guy had come to me, and walked in with a big, old, ugly air conditioner and asked me to make it cheaper, faster and lighter, I would have created a control product for air conditioning. But I was approached by a guy making a magnetic ballast for a particular application and he asked me to make it cheaper, faster and lighter. We did. Luckily, he rejected our proposal and that’s what started this venture for me.
So a lighting guy came to me and asked me to do something better, and one thing led to another. First we did the electronic ballast, and then I began to think about controls. Now we are where we are today—we don’t just have controls, we have a distributed lighting control system with virtual dimmers, desktop dimmers, smart dimmers, wall-mounted dimmers and all kinds of other things that we can do within the software.
I didn’t sit down and create the WECC Distributed Lighting Control System (DLCS) all at once—it came piecemeal, over the course of the last decade. As we were developing the product I talked to the potential users and we just kept adding to the design based on what they were telling me they needed and wanted.
And you know what just about everyone wanted in their lighting systems? They want to be behind the wheel, like when they drive their cars. A driver doesn’t want to go one speed, all the time, no matter what kind of road he’s on, because he needs a car to handle differently depending on the time of day, the width of the road, how many other cars are around him. He wants the car to perform to his specific needs without having to pay a premium, spend a lot of time thinking about it or wasting his energy. It’s the same thing with lighting. And people now have the ability to use technology to do just that.
What’s wrong with the way other control systems define control? Their definition is outdated. Control to them is photo cells, motion cells, maybe some kind of a timer. There’s no automation. There’s no talking to the lamps. They don’t know what the lamps are doing. They don’t know the temperature, the wattage, the voltage, the current. They don’t know the lamp life. They don’t know the ballast and lamp diagnostics. They’re totally in the dark and doing it the old way. We’ve solved that problem in an affordable, efficient way.
It’s time to move on and make the most of the technology currently available. We need to maximize technology so that we maximize both energy usage and energy savings. Don’t you want to know what’s up with the engine before your car dies? Don’t you want to know that your car is running efficiently and getting the best miles per gallon? Well that is exactly what our products do with lighting.