Is your lighting keeping up with the times
Hello everyone and welcome to the Ride Companion podcast ! I’m your host Jeff Hayman, co-founder of J2 Light, your source for Simple, Affordable, and Effective, wireless LED lighting and controls.
In this podcast I will discuss how the BLU Ecosystem provides benefits for the humans in charge of operating and maintaining commercial offices, schools, and medical facilities, as well as the humans that are working, learning, and sometimes suffering in these spaces.
Today, facility managers are dealing with a lot of complaints from occupants about indoor lighting being too bright. Approximately 15% of people are light sensitive which falls under the medical condition called photophobia. The causes of light sensitivity are varied, such as migraines, dry eyes, cataracts, post-concussion syndrome, ADHD…and more. Considering the amount of time, we spend looking at screens it should come as no surprise that dry eyes are a big problem. Lighting that is too bright and/or glary is causing everything from mild irritation to complete impairment. When this happens, the occupants turn to facilities managers for help but often there is no good way to solve the problem as most light fixtures cannot be dimmed and most spaces have meagre light controls if any.
At this point, I’d like to take a moment to say something that should be obvious to everyone with functional eyes. Vision is easily THE MOST IMPORTANT sense we have. According to professor Sur from the department of cognitive sciences pat MIT, “Half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision”. Why take precious time to state something that we would all agree to ? Because visual comfort is never discussed when it comes to lighting retrofits. Instead, the focus (excuse the pun), is to replace old fluorescent lamps with the cheapest LED replacements in order to capture a bit of energy savings.
Taken in a vacuum, this makes perfect sense. But, we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a world where productivity is paramount and human resources are expensive. The key word here is “human”… not robot. Our perception of the world is driven by a complex process that starts with light energy entering our brains through our eyes. If the lighting in our learning and workplace is overwhelming or inadequate, humans and productivity suffer.
I’m going to tell you a true story that clearly illustrates this point. After a warm introduction through a friend, I was afforded some time to introduce our BLU Ecosystem with an Operations Director, Project Foreman, and Building Automation Manager from a local schoolboard. We casually discussed retrofit products that offer really warm to really cool – white tuning, dimming, motion and daylight sensing along with wireless programmability from our free SMART BLU® CLOUD App. I emphasized that our products are affordable and simple to program and operate and seemed to be getting a lot of agreement from around the table. After an hour or so we wound up the meeting with an actionable that I was to provide some reading material for them to do further review. Pleased that I thought I had done a good job, I left the facility looking forward to doing the follow ups which I did as soon as I returned to the office.
Two weeks later, I had not heard back from the customer, but had created a follow up with the Building Automation Manager to discuss integration with the HVAC system. I arrived at an office where two fluorescent T-bar troffers were completely off and a standing floor lamp was dimly lit in a corner. After half an hour, the manager said “Jeff, I have to be honest with you, our director liked your products and was excited to try a pilot area, but I cannot see the value for the system beyond regular LEDs.” I was a bit taken aback, but recovered enough to ask, “can you expand on what you mean?” He said, “well, I don’t see the need for everyone to control their lights with their phones”. To this I thought I had perhaps done a poor job of outlining that using a phone as a virtual remote was only one option, and that we also had switches and battery-operated handheld remotes too.” I told him this and he seemed a bit surprised but maintained that he still did not see the value vs a standard LED fixture replacement. I told him that our BLU BaRS were competitive with most fixture replacement options and that he could enjoy all of the other benefits that went along for the ride. He said that he would consider it. Not wanting to pushback much further, I asked for the directions out of the building and left his office.
On the way out through a long corridor, I peered through windows that allowed a view into open cubicle farms. This is the point where things got really interesting. When I looked at the ceilings in the open offices, most of the lights had what looked like fabric covers hanging from the frames below the lenses. It gave me the feeling of being in Mad Max or some Pirate movie as the covers were multi-colored and billowing in the air supplied by ceiling vents. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This scene was repeated throughout the facility and finally I went into one of the spaces and asked the person working below one of these pirate fixtures, “what is that ?” She looked at me with a smile and said “those are glare controls”.
Mind blown… I just left an office where a floor lamp was being used instead of the regular fluorescents and now I was going through this apocalyptic light scape… I decided to double back and confront my customer with what I had witnessed. I found him in the office of the director and I interrupted their conversation to say “did you guys know that people are putting pillow cases under their light fixtures a scant 30 feet from your office ? You guys are the poster child for what I’m selling!” They both had grins and they said “yeah, well some people complain about the lights being too bright”. I was then invited to come and meet some of the occupants that were having trouble. “I was introduced as the guy who has lights that you can control from your phone.” Apparently, I really hammered home this point effectively, hehe.
The space that I was taken to, was a small cube farm with four people at desks all facing forward. They were surrounded by a “U” shaped walkway with perimeter offices. The area was dedicated to student services and got a lot of visitors. The lighting was a hodge podge of recessed 2×4 fluorescent troffers… 4 of 9 had beige covers affixed below the lenses with the remaining 5 lights completely off. Each of the 4 workstations had task lights at desk level and at the very back of the space were 2 standing floor lamps. The office directly in front had 2 fluorescent lights, one with beige and one with a dark blue cover. I was told that the ladies in the cube farm struggled with lights being overly bright and the person in the office suffered from migraines.
At this point I was asked to provide a quote to run a pilot study for this area. My response was to offer free product if the schoolboard was willing to provide the labor to install. I also expressed my desire to interview the occupants prior to retrofit and then two weeks post retrofit along with taking video footage to document the transformation. This was agreed to and within two weeks I came in for the pre-retrofit interviews. To see the video of the interviews a link has been provided in the podcast notes.
The story of what occurred in this admin office was very revealing. It starts out with a few people having trouble getting work done under lights that give them discomfort. They appeal to their superior for help and in turn the superior appeals to facilities operations. Facilities then sends someone out to review the issue with the occupants to assess what can be done. In this case, the lights were controlled by a switch outside of the open cubicle area and were not dimmable. So, facilities chose to disconnect lights that seemed to cause the problems. As you can imagine, the problems persisted because the contrast between light and dark increased dramatically. In search of relief, the next call was to Occupational Health and Safety. OHS then sends out a person to talk to the occupants and suggests that they install light covers which magnetically attach to the fixture frame. They give them a choice of colors and they select beige for the remaining lights. These get installed and still there is one light that remains a problem so facilities comes back to disconnect another light. When OHS comes back to see how it’s going, they notice that the desks are so dark that they recommend getting task lights. It doesn’t end there. The coup de gras is when the department head does a walk-through and suggests that a public facing area cannot look this dark, so facilities purchase some floor lamps that get added to the back wall. This is the point at which I entered the scene.
For the solution, J2 provided 9 new WiNDoZ™ low glare 2×4 troffer retrofit kits which are white tunable, dimmable, and include a combination motion & daylight sensor. The install took 15 minutes per fixture and I programmed the area within 5 minutes. One of the lights was set to low brightness and the remaining lights were set to a color and brightness level that was acceptable to all. After two weeks I came back and provided a slight adjustment. The lights come on automatically when the first person enters the area and they dim down and turn off when the area is unoccupied. I left a handheld battery-operated remote that allows the occupants the ability to adjust color and brightness as needed. The installed value of a project like this would be between $1,200 to $1,500 with an estimated energy savings of $135 per year.
When I asked the director how much he spent prior to the retrofit he said literally thousands. Take a moment to think about all the interactions that must have occurred between the occupants, their superiors, facilities administrators, labourers, OH & S, the work orders and requests for materials to be purchased, the labour to disconnect and add covers. This doesn’t even approach the productivity and health affects. Imagine being one of the individuals who suffer from light sensitivity. How motivated would you be to go into work ? Would you come in as late as possible, consider taking more time off or calling in sick ? Would you quit ? Would you be made to feel like an outcast amongst your piers ? It seems rather innocuous until you travel down this road aways.
You may think… ah, but this is peculiar only to this one client, but I must disabuse you of this thought. Since 2017 we have been exposed to this many times while doing project commissioning for various clients. We would be asked by facilities operations to set lights to a specific color and output. While adjusting lights in occupied spaces, we would always be confronted by a significant percentage of individuals requesting that we customize their space. Often, we would see residential table lamps or floor lamps or lights completely turned off. After all, why wouldn’t you want to be able to adjust light to your own specific needs. Seems completely rational. Tasks are different and people are different. You can even have differences within a given day for the same person.
So, if this is commonplace which I believe it is, then why does it persist ? Why do facilities continue to purchase cheap LED tubes and flat panel retrofits en masse ? Its because replacing like for like is considered low risk. This is a matter of awareness. The BLU Ecosystem is a novel approach to an old problem, and most are unaware of its existence. The experience most have with conventional lighting controls is that they are complex and expensive. Enabling facilities to inexpensively retrofit static legacy lighting with dynamic wireless controls is new concept and new carries the notion of risk. The reality is quite the opposite. Wireless controls have been around for nearly a decade and J2 Light has been supplying the market with wireless controllable lights since 2017. We have plenty of significant projects that attest to the reliability and value of the product.
Another reason for choosing cheap familiar options is that the day-to-day costs of placating light sensitive individuals is simply not accounted for, nor is the productivity losses. In the story I just recounted, the facilities manager did not consider the full cost until I asked him about it. It’s easy to see how the expenses involved slowly accrue over time and simply blend in with all the other maintenance costs. Records are not kept to account for the cost of old static lighting systems. Instead, the focus remains on energy consumption as the utility bills roll in every month as a continuous reminder.
It is our job to drag the human costs out from the shadows and expose them so that they may be properly accounted for. There are many risks involved in choosing T8 LED lamps and flat panels. They may seem to be a cheap way of modernizing, but you are abandoning 50% of the energy savings available to a programmable lighting system that includes automation. You are not capitalizing on human centric features such as white-tuning and dimming along with manual controls to make your property more attractive to occupants. This results in losses due to spaces being vacant for longer periods, poorer rates of worker attraction, productivity, absenteeism, and retention. Further, if occupants suffer from light sensitivity as I outlined previously, you have no viable solutions. In the end, you may be forced to revamp your lighting yet again to simply keep up with the times.I hope that I have provided you with some insights on how the BLU Ecosystem can support facilities managers to improve workplaces for their occupants while maximizing energy savings. For more information please visit our website at BLU-Ecosystem.com. Thank you for listening and I look forward to our next ride together.