The small village of Netherburn in South Lanarkshire, Scotland has seen it’s existing school replaced by a bright new modern one, with state of the art LED lighting and lighting controls.

Supplied by Thorn Lighting, the brief from the client was to keep operational costs to a minimum and limit general lighting maintenance in the future, helping to control the school’s budget.

To meet this need two approaches were taken:

1) Throughout the school as much as possible, LED luminaires were used. From Thorn’s Quattro LED recessed modular luminaire in the classes and corridors, providing crisp white light with excellent colour rendering and uniformity, through to the use of their BaseLED downlights in cloakroom and toilet areas. In addition all internal emergency lighting was LED based as well. The use of LED based products has kept the energy usage to a minimum, and has provided savings compared to traditional fluorescent options, and with 50,000 rated life has meant that costly lamp changes in the future are eliminated.  

2) Lighting Controls have been used throughout the school to help dim lighting where daylight is a contributory factor and to switch lighting off, accidentally left on, when areas are vacated. In the classes a mix of Thorn’s new Sensa Modular and Sensalite controls have been successfully used (not only in the school at Netherburn, but at another two schools built by South Lanarkshire Council). Simple and intuitive to operate, and contractor friendly to install, the use of microwave absence detection, daylight control over multi channels, and teacher over-ride means that the classes only use the artificial lighting they need, and if there is a need for the teacher to take control over the lighting they can do so. When the class empties at the end of the day the teacher has the choice of manually switching the lighting off or the control system will time it off after a set period of full absence. In corridors long range microwave units have been used to switch lighting on and off during periods of detection.

In summary, the school has great quality lighting throughout, when controlled by non-sophisticated lighting controls that the client has full control over, and doesn’t have the need for costly staff training or engineers to pay for when changes may be made in the future. A truly sustainable project.

Thorn Lighting

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