
Our Future’s Looking Brighter at Reliable Controls Headquarters
The terrible thing about the lighting business is it changes so rapidly. The past few decades have seen incandescent technologies replaced by fluorescent T12s, compact fluorescents, T8s, T5s, and now LEDs. The pace of technological development is so rapid, manufacturers and dealers aren’t interested in stocking replacement parts or offering upgrade kits for old fixtures. Reliable Controls facilities staff were recently dismayed to discover that when expensive exterior fixtures failed after just a few years, replacement parts were not available.
The wonderful thing about the lighting business is that it changes so rapidly. The technology is transmogrified every few years, with new features and energy savings so enticing, owners and consulting engineers happily sign up to retrofit lighting fixtures and controls that were installed just a few years earlier! Building codes change constantly, requiring new fixtures, new control components, and new control strategies. What a bonanza for dealers and contractors in the lighting business.
Reliable Controls dealers are aware that we design our controls to last many years, which means it will be the next generation who does the retrofit of those devices. How many times could you renovate the lighting fixtures and lighting controls in a building during that period? Sounds like good business, right?
Recently, the good guys in our Facilities department joined the madness. Would you believe we just upgraded most of the lighting fixtures and controls in the south annex of our headquarters building—less than 8 years after construction? Here’s why:
- The original installation used T5 fluorescent tubes and ballasts. Upgrading to LEDs provides significant energy savings.
- original dimming fluorescent ballasts were failing, which required an electrician and an expensive replacement part for each individual failure. It should be noted we never lost a single T5 tube in the 8-year period; that part of the technology was flawless.
- The original EnOcean transceivers that came with the light fixtures proved to have firmware problems, and the hardware was failing at an unacceptable rate.
- The original SMART-Sensor EnOcean Accesspoint devices and fixture transceivers used 315 MHz radios, which were superseded by 902 MHz devices a few years ago. For that reason, adding more EnOcean devices, like plug-load controls, to our existing 315 MHz system became problematic.