Designs for Lighting prove to be an asset, with design innovation on the Kent LED street lighting upgrade
Designs for Lighting (DfL) are currently working in partnership with Bouygues Energies & Services to deliver the Kent LED street lighting upgrade. DfL provide street lighting design and other specialist lighting design services for exterior, interior and architectural applications.
In total 120,000 assets (lighting points) are to be converted over a three-year period to meet ambitious energy saving objectives, required by the client Kent County Council (KCC)
DfL delivered the design of the initial 75,000 assets for Phase 1, designed and approved within the first 12 months. These luminaires are currently being installed throughout Kent. The remaining assets are traffic routes and town centres, these present a greater challenge, with more complex designs, but DfL propose to have them designed and approved within the next 12 months to satisfy the client’s demands.
KCC had an ambitious programme to ensure that every asset in Phase 1 was designed within a 12-month period. To achieve this, Bouygues Energies & Services and DfL worked in close partnership during the tender stage to find an innovative and sustainable design solution to meet the needs of such a fast-moving contract. This allows every asset to be designed and each street to have its own calculation, a specific requirement of the contract, enabling KCC to fully understand the design levels being achieved.
Richard Jackson, leading the DfL team on this project explains how the team developed an automated approach to many of the time consuming administrative tasks of the typical lighting design process. They took the inventory and wrote their own 3rd party program to work alongside Lighting Reality.
‘This process produced a clever piece of 3rd party design program for us to work with, enabling us to be more efficient, quicker and offer a fully customised design service to KCC’.
Great care and consideration were also given to ensure that the most energy efficient products were used for each road but at the same time the team ensured that the number of variants were streamlined to help stock management. The result is a fine balance between rationalisation and energy efficiency.
The overall contract had the requirement to meet a 60% energy saving. Thanks to the use of DfL’s lighting design software and to the partnership with the contractor Bouygues Energies & Services and involved manufacturers, the client was able to achieve an impressive saving of 65.7%. Through further development of their design system and with continued appraisal of the supply chain, the DfL team are confident of offering further energy savings.
Richard has also highlighted the importance of DfL’s design rationale statement.
‘We take the relevant lighting standards and apply these into the statement to act as a point of reference for both design team and client. This provides full clarity of our design thought process and decisions whilst demonstrating application of the required standards such as British Standards and ILP Guidance Notes’.
The project has been very successful in demonstrating an innovative approach to designing major LED street lighting installations by both working in close partnership with the client and design team and through innovation in DfL’s design process and software support.
Sue Kinsella, Lighting Asset Manager for KCC is more than happy with the result.
‘Designs for Lighting have been working with Kent County Council in designing 120,000 units as part of our Countywide LED conversion project. Whilst DfL have been employed by the main contractor they have been a key contributor, working with both the contractor and ourselves, in delivering all that was required of the contract, on time and to specification. DfL have taken the initiative in problem solving and they have been instrumental in ensuring the contract offers innovation and value for money through reductions in energy consumption. DfL have played a key role in the project and have gone above and beyond to ensure that we have met our targets.’