What commercial lighting control system are you using?

[MaxBurn]

What commercial lighting control system are you using and what do you like or not like about it? We are trying to find a good fit for us, we are primarily controls sales and service.

[MaxBurn]

Wow, posted this almost a month ago and still the top post on this sub forum.

Anyone know of a more active lighting/lighting control forum?

[s2sam]

Good day Maxburn,

Indeed, this forum on lighting is really quiet... I posted a few times and that has been about it. I have not yet found a lighting controls forum like the one we have in the HVAC controls. If you do fine out, please post up and/or let me know.

As for lighting controls... sadly, a lot of the lighting control vendors tend to be proprietary and/or quite expensive. Out where I am at, most of the buildings utilize lighting relays for primary control and so the two main vendors tend to be GE and Douglas. I have seen a few using Lutron, Cooper, and Wattstopper... There has been a few sites that have deployed Dali, but most if dimming is required use 0-10V. Overall I have not been impressed with any and especially so given the price and some of the gymnastics that one sometimes has to go through to get pricing and/or stock. Reliable Controls released a lighting controller that looks interesting last year and so that might be one to look at.

In our case I got fed up and so I designed a full Douglas controller replacement that is less expensive, has way more features, and best of all provides the greatest flexibility for our customers. The device can be operated as a stand alone controller with scheduling (time and auto calc of sunrise/sunset times, etc), or a web interface, or connected to the BMS via Bacnet MS/TP (or N2 or Modbus). Hopefully next month I will include Bacnet IP functionality to fully round out the device. Later this year I will be designing a GE relay version as well. In addition to the controllers I have had a bear of time to find any low voltage (LV) switches that are slick and/or have cool features. It seems that the available LV switches are either proprietary or simply look like hell. So... I have yet another product(s) to design... In fact I came to this forum to ask if anyone has found any modern Dali, etc LV switches that are available.

Anyway, feel free to contact me if you wish some additional feedback or issues facing some of the newer GE and Douglas controllers.

Cheers,

Sam

[s2sam]

Good day again Maxburn,

I forgot to add that you may wish to subscribe or become a member of the IES.org, as their publication (LD+A) has a lot of info from a number of vendors. Most of this info tend to be fixtures, but from time to time I do see control ads. Given that it tends to cater to lighting designers and architects, pricing of these products tend to be up there.

Also another lighting forum that is a bit more active is https://www.electriciantalk.com/f8/.

Cheers,

Sam

[BetterDuck]

What commercial lighting control system are you using and what do you like or not like about it? We are trying to find a good fit for us, we are primarily controls sales and service.

LOYTEC has an easy to use and configure lighting control system. It's Dali or DMX and gets you to BACnet MSTP or IP. They have 0-10v modules, color, phase dimming, pulse, relays.... multisensors with beaconing. You can change groups and other settings at runtime. Make HTML 5 graphics and get an IoT interface for fun. Highly scalable.