Home to around 15,000 students and at over 400 years old, a leading Scottish University has recently made some significant improvements to their campus lighting system. “For uniformity, every lecture room has a switch with four settings for a number of years now,” said Charlie Simpson, Senior Electrical Engineer for the University, “Bright, Medium, Dim and of course Off. And this has allowed our faculty members to change the lighting for their lectures and AV presentations.”

Customer Expectations

Charlie stated at the start that professors once used the dimming features for lectures when using the old overhead projectors. However, today they use computers with PowerPoint™ presentations and DVDs, but the need to vary the lighting in the classrooms still remains the same. “For years we built our own lighting control panels, and the cost was incredibly high per classroom, plus very time consuming for me and the team” said Charlie. “Then last year ago we switched to an ‘off the shelf’ DALI dimming configuration and got rid of the old 0- to 10-volt system/ballasts we were cobbling together. The DALI solution significantly reduced our costs and saved hours in terms of installation time.

For lecture rooms and other areas or lighting applications where complex scenes/reconfigurable zones were required, DALI dimming ballasts and controls now allow users to independently control multiple lighting zones. This technology is perfect for applications requiring sophisticated dimming such as lecture halls, conference rooms, lobbies, corridors and general faculty amenities such as libraries, IT suites etc.

Customer Comment

We were made aware of the Siemens GAMMA range of sensors, actuators, gateways etc and we did a trial by installing a simple configuration in one of our conference rooms and it worked exactly as needed. Then our lamp crew put the controller through its paces and, after extensive testing, we decided to roll out across the campus. We are now able buy an off-the-shelf system for lighting control for a very reasonable price. The fact the DALI dimming system is an open standard that can be purchased ‘off-the-shelf’ is incredibly important. The great thing about DALI is that its not a custom device and our staff can easily program it to assure uniformity throughout the campus. Custom building is so expensive and time-consuming, I just can’t believe we stuck with it for so long.

Top Features

1. Remote controls in all lecture rooms allowing control of main room functions such as lighting, HVAC etc.
2. N 525 E switching/dimming actuators that connect the KNX EIB with digital primary switching devices that have a DALI interface. There are 8 channels, of which each one has the capacity of a switching/dimming actuator. The DALI operating devices of each individual channel are directly wired so that no further additional commissioning procedure is necessary for the primary switching devices.
3. KNX / DALI N 141 gateways are DINrail mounted for the DALI ballasts and enable the receipt of switching and dimming commands, but also the send status information such as the failure of a lamp or the report of a detected error in the electronic ballast direct to Charlie.
4. Sun/antidazzle protection actuators for controlling all roller blinds.
5. Sensors for HVAC that detect the temperature and deliver the basic values for optimum control.
6. Motion/Presence Detection in all main hallways/corridors
7. Electrical Power Counter/Meter that allows Charlie to keep an eye on electrical power consumption at all times.