Background

The Lovett School is a kindergarten through twelfth grade independent school. It is nestled on 100 acres of forested and riverfront land in Atlanta, GA, United States of America. It was founded in 1926 by Eva Edwards Lovett, an innovative educator who emphasized the development of the whole child. The campus has grown to close to 800,000 square feet of buildings meant to support over 1,600 students throughout the year.

Opportunity

The school facilities department was asked to improve visitor experience in their multi-usage garage that is mostly used by student, teachers and parents for daily school classes, activities, and special sports events. The goal of the project was to maximize the sense of security on site, while lowering the impact the parking garage lighting had on neighbors, and do accomplish this without raising electricity cost.

Most parking garages require 24-hour lighting, 7 days a week, which leads to high energy costs. The team decided to look at adaptive lighting solutions and started by evaluating a motion sensor solution that would be embedded in parking garage luminaires, commonly referred to as a stand-alone, which provides additional energy saving to LED lighting technology. They soon realized the solution had significant drawbacks. For example, when activity is detected, the light is increased to the maximum level only for a location to close proximity where the activity was detected and kept it at a maximum level for a long period of time, sometimes up to 15 minutes. To change such behavior some solutions require changes to each luminaire, one at a time, which was time consuming.

Shortly after that solution was tested, a network systems solution was considered but many of the options available were too complex to implement and in the long term would not be easy to maintain. Plus, many cyber security related concerns were raised by the team to those networked and cloud-based solution manufacturers, and he did not return a suitable answers that made the team feel comfortable moving forward with the solutions.

Solution

The Lovett School facilities department found that with WaveLinx Lite, they could deploy a motion sensor control solution that would allow them to group luminaires together and raise lighting levels for a whole area to eliminate scattered dark areas that existed while walking or driving through the garage – all without the need of a gateway.

They decided to implement WaveLinx Lite and deploy Cooper Lighting Solutions Top Tier and Galleon luminaires with WaveLinx Lite motion sensors in an area of the parking garage. The system was operational “out-of-the-box” as a stand-alone system, without any programming required. The team only had to downloaded the app to create groups and explorer additional features. The team was pleased with the simplicity of the solution overall. The time saved configuring groups with WaveLinx Lite versus installing a stand-alone, wired or cloud-based solution for the entire parking garage was really a determining factor in choosing WaveLinx Lite.

The chief operating officer was impressed by total cost of ownership, return on investment based on the energy savings gained from using WaveLinx Lite. The team is confident WaveLinx Lite is the right solution for them today and the future, as they can easily scale the system by upgrading to a secure network solution in the future without changing the luminaire sensors, as well as the ability to connect to the Trellix IoT platform.