How Do YOU Commission Daylighting?
As I wrote in a previous post here, I’m supporting the IES Commissioning Committee in developing an RP about lighting and control commissioning, including commissioning of lighting and, separately, commissioning of lighting controls.
We are considering including some guidance on commissioning daylighting—both its interaction with the electric lighting system, and as an independent light source in the space delivered through whatever media was installed—windows, skylights, light shelves, etc.
I’m hoping LightNOW’s readers might be able to offer some insights on:
Procedures people can use to verify installation?
Procedures people can use to perform operational checks?
What is essential to include in the owner notification phase?
Thanks for any insights you may be willing to share to support development of this important document!
Commissioning Daylight Harvesting systems is a little tricky. There are many things you have to do and Foot Candle levels you have to check before you can program the room.
You need a Foot candle measurment device. It will make your life a lot easier.
Usually daylight harvesting systems are split up into different zones within a room. Usually Zone 1 is located near the windows or natural daylight in the room. From there each zone is marked walking to the opposite side of the room.
I have programmed a few application with daylight harvesting. The best system I installed had about a 92% energy savings!!!
Each classroom in this elementary school was pulling 5 amps before the system was installed. After the system was installed and programmed each classroom was pulling .5 amps!! That is extraordinary!!!
This system has skylights with dowsers to open and close the light coming in.
When commissioning a system with dimming and motor controls you have to measure the foot candle levels with no artifical light in the room for each zone.
Once that is established you can now check on your controller and see what foot candle level the photocell is seeing and make sure that is correct.
Now you can program “setpoints” for each zone. A Setpoint tells the system that you want a certain foot candle level to be maintained in that zone. So if there is not enough natural daylight it will dim up the artificial light to get to that foot candle level.
Once that is done then you need to check and make sure everything is doing what it is supposed to.
If everything is wired correctly your system should start saving energy immediately and you will see instant payback in next months electric bill.
Thank you, Wayne! We can use this information in our controls section.
I’m wondering about the daylighting system itself, consisting of light shelves, active sun trackers, the glazing, shading (manual or automatic), even foliage that plays a role in daylighting. What is the process to verify installation and ensure the installation is achieving the design intent?
How is it “commissioned”?
This is an excellent forum. I will like to see some standarization in what some people call commissioning Daylighting on the Lighting Industry.
First, we should discussed Daylighting, it covers so many aspects of any building. Then what is or should be the definition of commissioning.