Electric lighting at the workplace in offices: Efficiency improvement margins of automation systems

Abstract

Electric lighting is one of the major energy loads in non-residential buildings. It is strategic to examine the real behaviour of available lighting control systems for practical applications so as to allow the development of strategies that can improve the reliability of measured data (in terms of illuminance at the desktop) and the consequent response of the control system. This paper presents a case study of an office where lighting data measured at the desktop and read by the automation system have been analysed. It also investigates the consequent response of the control system. In particular, we extrapolate data on the system's improvement margins and suggest suitable correction functions to be applied to the illumination data measured by ceiling-mounted sensors.