Daniel J SaitIn the residential space, market research that was conducted by CEDIA in 2017, showed that lighting control had shown dramatic growth in revenue per project and that this growth was expected to continue. In whole home integration projects, lighting played a vital role in 46% of these jobs.
Three years later, and with more people spending time at home and understanding the benefits that an integrated lighting system can provide, it’s expected that this figure will have increased drastically.
With this in mind, electrical contractors, lighting designers and technology integrators are finding themselves working alongside each other to design and specify integrated lighting systems.
While working with the same goal in mind, all three professionals have their own responsibility on the project. The electrical contractors understand the mathematics and the requirements for electrically correct and safe electrical systems, while lighting designers focus on fixtures, colour temperature and colour rendering indexes and the technology integrators deal with lighting control systems, installation and specific lighting control systems.
All three of these elements need to be compatible, specified alongside each other, and installed correctly to make sure they work. However, with the three professions usually working separately and not necessarily understanding what the others are working on, there’s often room for mistakes and errors on site, resulting in frustrations, difficult working relationships and more time and money spent to fix the issues.
The Lighting Designer
Naturally its vital for everyone to be on the same page, so The Lighting Designer (TLD), with its cloud-based design and specification tool that has been developed for the lighting industry, feels it has an important role to play.
TLD created its software to allow all three professions to use the same system, inputting their relevant information and creating a working document that covers all aspects of the lighting job.
With two different approaches – Top Down and Bottom Up – whether you are a technology integrator who uses a programming software like Crestron D3 Pro or Lutron HomeWorks, or an electrical contractor or lighting designer who marks up the lighting requirements on a design drawing or spreadsheet, this information can very quickly and easily be added into TLD, says the platform’s creator.
TLD argues that no longer will a driver be specified with the wrong fixture or cable length or be installed in the wrong location, as the pdf document includes everything from load schedules to photometric data, specification cut sheets to CAD drawings and a bill of materials.
“Since our launch in June, registered users have been working on projects in TLD and it’s been fantastic to see the way in which the software has improved the design and specification process for them,” comments Guy Singleton, The Lighting Designer inventor. In the background, we’ve been working hard to develop new tools and fine tune any issues that we’ve come up along the way. We believe that the software saves integrators, electrical contractors and lighting designers both time and money and provides them with a more efficient way of working on lighting projects.”
Installers can sign up for the The Lighting Designer from £200.