Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1347119
52 I ICT TODAY The client did not want a traditional office space with drop ceilings and generic 2X2 lights but rather an open-ceiling design with a wide range of architectural LED lighting fixtures from 20 different lighting manu- facturers (Figure 2). The requirement to have all lights connected to the network and powered via PoE entailed significant coordination and customized design. To support the 2,500 PoE lights and 100 different lighting system configurations throughout the new facility, Brad Sandman, the installer and division manager for the project, and Bob Mobach introduced a vendor-agnostic node that provides both data and power to all LED lighting fixtures, low-voltage sensors, and wall controllers. This allowed the facility to achieve a fully-connected intelligent PoE lighting system through- out. The nodes are backed by a web-enabled, Ethernet- based supervisory controller and cloud-based portal that enables the monitoring and control of the entire lighting system from a centralized location, as well as data analytics and reporting on sensor, energy, and system use data. "Often engineers or building managers will expect energy savings based on how they believe things will be used, but by having data, you can see what is actually happening. Without information, you simply don't know where to start," explains Dwight Stewart, CEO and chairman of a smart buildings innovation company. "A PoE-based software-defined system allows customers to make improvements and adjustments quickly and easily. For example, by looking at analytics, we found that we could save 50% energy in a large common space by changing motion sensor timeouts from 5 minutes to 3 minutes. This can be verified because there is the data to prove it." The control platform was also critical to meet California's Title 24 building energy efficiency require- ments, such as lighting power density allowances for various types of spaces, mandatory time-out occupancy sensors, and daylight dimming. The building also features PoE-enabled electro-chromatic glass that is electronically tintable and can be adjusted by controls inside interior conference rooms. FIGURE 2: Architectural PoE-enabled LED lighting fixtures from 20 different lighting manufacturers were used throughout the facility.