Lubio controls reduce lighting energy costs
A
Schneider Electric product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Oct 24, 2008
Schneider Electric has revealed how an installation of its Lubio lighting controls has enabled a long stay car park at Birmingham airport to save energy and maintenance costs.
The usual arrangement for lighting large outdoor areas such as car parks is to use a small number of high-mast lighting fittings.
In the case of Birmingham airport's long-stay car park one, however, the proximity of a runway means that it is impossible to adopt this approach.
Instead, a much larger number of low-mast lighting fittings have to be used.
In fact, 180 fittings, each of which has a 70W SON-T high-pressure sodium lamp, are used to light the 500-space car park.
This relatively large number of fittings made the car park a particularly attractive target for energy saving measures.
To evaluate how effective such measures might be, Schneider Electric agreed to provide a trial installation based on its Lubio lighting controllers.
Three controllers were fitted - one master and two slaves - together with metering and recording equipment from the company's Powerlogic range.
To make it easier to evaluate the performance of the Lubio installation, a switch was incorporated so that the Lubio controllers could be bypassed and the lighting fittings fed direct from the supply.
All of the equipment was fitted in a feeder-pillar enclosure, which was installed out of doors adjacent to the car park.
The Lubio controllers were configured to provide energy savings in two ways - by controlling the switch-on and switch-off times for the installation, and by regulating the voltage applied to the lamps.
Regulation of the lamp supply voltage is a useful way of achieving energy savings as it offers the useful bonus of increasing the service life of the lamps.
Prior to fitting the Lubio controllers, the lamps in this application were fed directly from the mains supply.
Although this has a nominal voltage of 240V, records made during the trial revealed that it varied from 232.5V to 252.8V.
The high-voltage excursions are particularly detrimental to lamp life.
The Lubio controllers were set to provide a constant output of 220V during the car park's hours of peak usage, and 200V from 22:00 to 04:00, when the car park is less busy.
Direct measurement of the lighting levels showed that, even when operating at 200V, these were higher than the average of 30 lux and minimum of 10 lux specified in the CIBSE factfile for outdoor car parks in urban areas.
With the Lubio system bypassed, the average energy usage over a 30-minute interval was 7.326kW, while with Lubio in circuit this fell to 5.665kW, a saving of more than 19 per cent.
The savings in reactive power were around 47 per cent.
Total harmonic distortion was also reduced by approximately a third on all three phases, and the power factor was held close to unity, except for short intervals while the lamps were starting up.
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