Bowen House: WELLINGTON, New Zealand
Winner of a Lighting Design Commendation Award for Energy Efficiency at the IESANZ Awards 2019
Bowen House is a 22-storey office building in Wellington, New Zealand that is leased by the Parliamentary Service for government staff. The Bowen House upgrade is the first full high-rise building in New Zealand to install Organic Response lighting controls.
The combined lighting and controls solution provides the New Zealand government with one of the country’s most cutting edge lighting systems.
OVERCOMING LIMITATIONS
Updating the inefficient and high maintenance lighting, which was installed in 1990, presented a number of limitations.
The new lighting design would need to be a one-to-one luminaire replacement and, while the upgrade called for a simple and programmable lighting controls solution, the building offered no wiring for a control system.
The new lighting solution would also need to be able to adapt to and be easily adjusted by the ministerial staff who worked irregular hours.
DESIGN CRITERIA
Bowen House required:
A full upgrade of the existing luminaires and lighting control
The upgrade to be completed out of hours and office to remain fully functional
A system that was simple to operate and can be programmed by onsite facility managers.
A solution that worked independent of any network connection.
A solution that met a set capital budget, with cost payback of 5 years required.
SELECTION CRITERIA
Several luminaires and lighting control systems were evaluated against the criteria of:
Aesthetics
Performance
Initial and total cost
Ease of programming
SOLUTION
The best match for the design and selection criteria were Eagle Lighting Australia’s AureLED luminaire, coupled with the advanced lighting controls of Organic Response.
ENERGY EFFECTIVENESS
The luminaries were trimmed to 60% in transverse areas and 70-75% in office areas to provide a uniform environment and account for individual preferences.
The combined lighting/controls solution will provide 86% energy savings and a 90% reduction in maintenance costs.
A Life Cycle Carbon Calculation show a reduction in emissions of 939 tons of CO2 over 10 years.
BENEFITS
The Organic Response system is completely plug and play for base-level functionality, allowing for ease of installation and setup with minimal disturbance to staff.
By upgrading to a 30W LED luminaire, with low glare and good uniformity, the illumination of all surfaces was greatly increased. By increasing the ambient light levels on the ceiling, walls and floor, the buildings occupants perceive the space to be brighter, resulting in a better working environment.
Improved lighting also provides a significant positive effect to occupants - visually, biologically and emotionally.
Having occupancy sensors integrated into each luminaire has significantly increased sensor density. This sensor density ensures that the lighting is more responsive to the building’s occupants where Organic Response acts like a school of fish where every individual node communicates with its nearest neighbours, and responding accordingly.
As an example, Organic Response offers a ‘personality’ setting where the mesh network automatically determines the dimming and dwell time values of each luminaire. This setting reduces light levels concentrically away from the sensor that is activated, depending on movement and occupancy levels. The more an occupant/s move within the floorplate, the more luminaires would dim-up to max light levels.
KEY POINTS
Organic Response sensors integrate into the luminaires affording a fast and easy deployment, requiring no new or extra cabling.
Adding a robust and proven Organic Response lighting control solution allowed the floors to be more efficient as only areas there were occupied had lights turned on.
The Organic Response app affords the client’s FM team to deploy simple and intuitive lighting control strategies across the floors, without the need for complex DALI addressing or specialist system integrators.
The ELA light fittings powered by Organic Response’s smart sensors offers a robust mesh network provision should the client want to tap into the IoT layer of smart buildings.