Professional 3D Lighting Photometric Design

Full Transcript

Kevin
This is Kevin with CommercialLEDLights.com on our LED Lighting podcast. And today we're going to talk about photometric lighting plans. I'm here with the CEO, Charlie and also our photometric lighting engineer, Peter. How are you guys doing?

Charlie / Peter
I'm doing well. Thank you.

Kevin
Wonderful. We're going to take it right from the top here. What is a photometric lighting plan? First of all, Charlie.

Charlie
Yeah, a photometric lighting plan is typically a 2D or 3D layout or plan that illustrates light levels throughout the building or property. So it's really a great way to visualize the final lighting levels that will be achieved. Oftentimes to meet a certain application of what you might be doing in the building or the lighting levels that maybe you're looking for in a parking lot. Or oftentimes most importantly to meet city municipal codes of lighting levels. So it's a way to make sure you get that right.

Kevin
I see. Peter, could you kind of walk us through how you design these photometric lighting plans?

Peter
Well, the lighting design software doing the photometric consists of two parts, basically. First part is constructing the model, the building, the indoor facility, the outdoor facility. And you can do that a couple of ways. You can do it from architectural drawing. You could do it from a Google map. Let's say if you are doing street lighting, you can get the intersection from Google map, do a screenshot and then import that into the model and then build off of that, or you can do it as simple as a customer supplying a sketch. So you build the model and then you insert the lights via the IES file. The IES file is basically an electronic file that models the performance of individual lights (luminaries). And that comes from the lighting lab which basically measures a lights performance via a machine called a ‘goniophotometer’. And what that is, it's a device that you set the light in a device and then you have a rotating spectrometer that measures the intensity of the light at 360 degree ranges around the light at different distances. And that accurately simulates the performance of a light.

Kevin
Interesting Charlie. Why would somebody want a photometric lighting plan for their project?

Charlie
Sure. There's kind of two buckets that this falls in. First is if a customer calls and is maybe retrofitting a parking lot, or maybe a large warehouse, or a sporting field, or stadium, or whatever it might be, and they have legacy lights there. Sometimes it's not as simple as just simply saying, you have a 400 watt HID. So, 100 / 250 watt LED is gonna work for you. The application might be as such that they might want to achieve more or less, or want to understand if they need to add poles or maybe even delete poles if it's a parking lot example. So there's really only one way to do that and that is to scientifically do a study, which is the photometric, to determine what it is, is going to achieve the best result in that retrofit.

Another example might be a new warehouse that you need to maybe doing some engineering in, or whatever it might be, and that might require something greater than the normal warehouse levels and you don't know what light you need to use. So we figure that out by doing a photometric to achieve the proper amount of foot handles at a certain plane in the building. So those are the couple of main reasons why you might want one.

Kevin
Fair enough. And I think that leads into my next question, Peter. What kind of applications have you done for photometrics, if you want to just talk about a couple of the applications, common applications you provided photometric, lighting plans for.

Peter
Well, we've done indoor and outdoor photometric lighting designs. For example, for outdoor, we've done pickle ball courts, a gun range, horse arena, and those are a couple of outdoor examples. Indoor. We've done, let's say, a football sized warehouse. We did a maintenance shop for, a park facility out west. And what we're working on right now is an entertainment complex that combines both indoor and outdoor. It has a mini golf, it has a go kart track, it has indoor pinball arcade and ultimately, you'll have 2 18 hole golf courses. So, we've done plenty of indoor and outdoor photometric plan.

Kevin
Sounds like quite a project. And how does somebody, Charlie, how does somebody go about getting a photometric designed?

Charlie
Sure. Well, there's 2 ways you can request a photometric from us. First is, you can just simply give us a call, let us know about your project. Let us know what you're looking to achieve. And if it requires a photometric, then we will get you in touch, with the right person, Peter here usually. Or we do have a form on our website commercialledlights.com, that is just, it's simply there. You can't really miss it, which is “request a photometric” and that form you'll fill out your contact information a little bit about your project. You know, is it indoor? Is it outdoor? How many square feet is it? Just a few things, so we have just kind of a general idea what it is we'll be talking about when we give you a call to follow up on that.

Kevin
All right. Well, that's all I got for you today. I hope this has been informative and thank you guys for being on the show.

Charlie
You're welcome. Thank you.