Turning off lights when they are not needed is one of the best ways to save energy. This is especially true in market buildings, where lighting can account for up to 40% of the building's total energy cost.
With wireless lighting control, you don't need to rely on employees to turn lights on and off. Instead, you can take benefit of scheduling, timers, occupancy sensors and photosensors to deliver the optimal illumination level in all situations while minimizing wasted energy.
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Many customary building and lighting control systems are fully wired, with all lights, sensors and switches hard-wired to a central controller or gateway.
Newer lighting systems take benefit of wireless mesh networking, which allows the lights, sensors, switches and the central controller to quote with each other without the need for wires. Removing the wires provides more flexibility in terms of where switches and sensors can be placed, and makes it more affordable to comprise supplementary sensors in the network.
Wireless mesh also supports more flexible and easier control of larger systems with more devices. It allows you to run your lighting control solution as a singular theory that covers an entire building (or manifold buildings), as well as room by room (or floor by floor) deployments. This provides a system-wide view of operations, current power usage, savings, and more.
So how does a wireless mesh network work?
It consists of a mesh of interconnected devices (such as luminaires, switches, and controllers). Each gismo contains a small radio transmitter that it uses for communication. The transmitters can be built in to the gismo or can be fitted externally.
In a wireless mesh network, each gismo is typically connected straight through at least two pathways, and can relay messages for its neighbors.
Data is passed straight through the network from gismo to gismo using the most trustworthy transportation links and most productive path until the destination is reached. Two-way transportation also helps to increase reliability, by allowing devices to acknowledge receipt of data and to want retransmission of data not received.
The mesh network is self-healing, in that if any disruption occurs within the network (such as a gismo failing or being removed), data is automatically re-routed. The built-in redundancy of having manifold pathways ready helps to make the mesh network both robust and reliable.
Mesh networks are also very scalable, in that you can enlarge the network simply by adding more devices. The network's self-configuring capabilities recognize when a gismo is added: working out what type of gismo it is, where its neighbors are, and what the best path is straight through the network. Weak signals and dead zones can also be eliminated simply by adding more devices to the network.
Pros and cons
While mesh networks furnish many benefits for lighting control, and removing the wires provides even more along with increased flexibility and reduced premise costs. But no singular solution is exquisite for everyone. Below is a overview of both the pros and cons of wireless mesh lighting control:
Cost: premise costs are greatly reduced without the need to run control wires from each gismo back to the central controller. However, wireless sensors and controls are sometimes more expensive than their wired counterparts, so some of the money you save on wiring may go back into purchasing the wireless devices.
Security: Both wired and wireless solutions furnish productive security. Most wireless lighting technologies use 128-bit advanced Encryption standard (Aes) safety for communications. This safety is robust adequate that, in June 2003, the Us Government announced that Aes may be used to protect classified information.
Scalability: Wireless mesh solutions keep more devices over greater distances than wired ones, which makes wireless ideal for multi-office and multi-floor installations. The nature of mesh networks means that simply adding new devices can enlarge the transportation coverage of the network. And the wireless nature of the controls allows you to place them in areas that were previously difficult or costly to access.
Reliability: Both wired and wireless networks use mature technologies that offer great robustness and reliability. There is the inherent of radio interference and data loss with some wireless technologies that share the same radio frequency (such as Wi-Fi® and ZigBee®). Fortunately, this question is verily avoided for your lighting solution by choosing channels within the radio frequency that are not generally used by other wireless devices. You can supplementary protect yourself by choosing a wireless mesh technology like ZigBee, which can automatically switch to a new channel if it detects interference on the current channel.
Flexibility: This is one of the biggest benefits of wireless. Devices can be installed where they will furnish maximum benefit instead of where it is easiest to run wires. Devices are also grouped into "zones" using addressing and software rather than hard wiring, which allows changes to be made at any time straight through straightforward software reconfiguration (no costly or disruptive rewiring required).
Complexity: Wireless allows you to avoid the complexity of connecting wires from hundreds (or thousands) of devices back to a controller, but that comes at a price. It can be more difficult to locate a gismo when you don't have wires to follow. The good news is that tools are ready to help you locate and recognize devices while premise and commissioning, and for the ongoing operation, monitoring and maintenance of the system.
The Pros and Cons of Wireless Lighting operate
