Ex-Or manages lighting for council’s flagship office building
Among best-practice sustainable features in Birmingham City Council’s new £38 million office development in Woodstock, Aston, is the use of Ex-Or’s MLS digital managed lighting system to control the 4000 light fittings throughout the building in open-plan office areas, corridors, meeting rooms, washrooms and lobby areas. The new building has 22 000 m2 of space on five floors and will accommodate over 3000 staff when it is fully occupied later this year.
The Ex-Or system provides fully integrated lighting management using communicating presence detectors that share information of occupancy patterns throughout the building. This capability ensures that the system automatically provides optimum lighting conditions to deliver light only when it is needed so as not to waste energy.
Rows of work stations in the open-plan areas are controlled by the system. In addition, intelligent daylight sensors in work areas close to perimeter glazing and the four internal atria maximise the benefit of natural light.
This lighting control makes a significant contribution to the building being on target to achieving a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating.
Luminaire UK supplied the specially designed lighting fittings to Emcor for installation and commissioned Ex-Or to provide the lighting control. Ian Bury, managing director of Luminaire, said, ‘We have incorporated Ex-Or lighting management into other projects, so we were confident Ex-Or would deliver significant savings and prove totally reliable in operation.’
Other features of the building include CHP, passive ventilation, rainwater harvesting and solar PV. A ‘brown roof’ is designed to attract wildlife and providing additional thermal insulation.
