Rugby Borough Council has reduced energy with a lighting control system from Clipsal.
In this environment-conscious era, it is incumbent on local councils to save as much energy as possible. One of the most effective ways of doing this is with the installation of lighting control systems.

Rugby Borough Council has taken this route with a new control system from Clipsal. Installed by Emery Electrical, 30 luminaires are controlled by daylight sensors that smoothly dim light levels to make use of the available natural light. Passive infrared (PIR) presence detectors have also been included in interview rooms.

The system has given immediate results. Consumption in May dropped by around 30% and a comparison of March and April with the same months last year shows a similar reduction.

Ted Weston, the Council's principal property maintenance officer said: "The electrical consumption includes lighting and small power and, if anything, our small power loads would have gone up as we are using more PCs than before. The drop in energy usage must therefore be attributable to the lighting control system."

The Council chose to install Clipsal's C-Bus system: a single network can be up to 1 km long and handle up to 100 devices.

C-Bus is a distributed control system. Using a Cat 5 unshielded twisted pair cable, the bus operates at a safety extra low voltage of 36 V dc to carry digital signals from switches or controllers to luminaires.