Industry House, Canberra

Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources, Australia

Industry House is the new fifteen storey home of the Australian Government's Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources. The building showcases an energy efficient, international standard DALI lighting control system to provide the perfect workplace for staff of the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources and the Minister for Small Business and Tourism.

The Department is structured into a number of divisions including AusIndustry, Energy and Environment, Innovation, Resources, Manufacturing, Engineering and Construction, Small Business, Tourism, and eBusiness.

As a landmark building in the heart of Canberra Industry House is designed to meet the rigorous standards of the new Building Code of Australia providing a flexible, user-friendly and energy efficient workplace.

In keeping with the engineering, innovation and environmental aims of the Department the system provides the latest lighting control features including scheduled control, manual control, computer control, occupancy control, scenes, sequences and daylight harvesting.

The control system is easily maintained integrating both general lighting and emergency lighting in a single monitored system. The system is designed to be future-proof where changing requirements can be met with simple software reconfiguration without the need to rewire.

The DALI Control system meets all these requirements providing easy installation, powerful and flexible control and easy maintainability.

Structure

Industry House’s lighting system is a true distributed control system combining 143 DALI loops onto 73 BM2500 controller/gateways on an Ethernet network. 6600 DALI devices consisting of Tridonic ballasts, inverters and relay modules and Spire Atstar emergency luminaires and Exit Signs control the light sources. The BM2500’s are located on each floor in distribution boards adjacent to the two cable risers. Each BM2500 controls two DALI loops using Tridonic DALI-SCI interfaces and includes 16 inputs for occupant control using switches, occupancy sensors and integration with the access control system.

A major advantage of the DALI Control system is the ease of installation and commissioning. The 5-pin ‘soft-wiring’ system reduced labour costs and the distributed architecture enabled sections to be tested and commissioned ready for the tenant as each area was installed.

Scheduled Occupancy

Each BM2500 controller/gateway includes a real-time clock with automatic leap year adjustment. A location setting enables automatic adjustment for daylight saving and calculation of sunrise and sunset times. External flagpole and façade lights are scheduled on and hour before sunset and off 30 minutes after sunrise. Common foyer areas within the building are scheduled according to the scheduled occupancy of the area.

Normal and After-hours

Offices and workstation areas are controlled with push-to-make switches that provide different functionality for office hours and after-hours operation. The controllers determine the time of day and apply the appropriate input profile. During office hours an office switch acts a single button dimmer while after-hours the button toggles lights on and off with an override sequence that ensures lights are never left on.

Sequences

A design requirement of the building is that an occupant is never plunged into immediate darkness. Sequences are used to gradually reduce the amount of light before switching off. Lights are restored by a switch or computer control. Sequences are used throughout the building and are particularly useful in meeting rooms, toilets, breakout areas and for after-hours overrides.

Occupancy Control

As expected in a high activity government department Industry House features many meeting rooms of varying sizes from small rooms to large conference facilities. Lights in meeting rooms are automatically commanded on when an occupant enters the room. The lights can then be adjusted as required for meetings and presentations. Intelligence in the BM2500 determines if the lights are already on and acts accordingly in response to occupancy sensors.

Daylight Harvesting

In order to minimise energy usage automatic daylight harvesting is employed on two rows of perimeter lights of each floor. Tridonic Smart LSII sensors are fitted to the DALI ballasts thereby providing automatic dimming to compensate for the amount of natural light. In normal operation the LSII sensor dims the lights whenever the fitting is commanded on however BM2500’s provide an override feature to set a designated light level and to provide a burn-in function that ensures lamps are correctly burnt in before dimming is applied.

In some circumstances on the western side a third row of lights is controlled offset from the second row using intelligence in the BM2500.

Emergency Lights

The DALI standard provides status information for ballasts and emergency and evacuation lighting thereby eliminating the need for a separate monitored emergency system. The Industry House control system provides ballast and lamp failures and emergency lighting reports. Automatic testing of the emergency fittings is carried out in accordance with Australian Standards.

Maintenance

The Industry House system is easily maintained using the combined features of DALI and the BM2500 controller/gateway. The status of all DALI devices are scanned by the BM2500’s and faults are reported by SMS, Email or Pager. Access to status information is available on the local area network and if required over the WAN and the Internet using the built-in web server.

All settings from DALI ballasts are backed up in the BM2500’s making ballast replacement a simple one-click operation. Replacement ballasts are addressed and their DALI settings are automatically restored by the controller.

Conclusion

The distributed DALI Control system provides Industry House with powerful and flexible control while delivering an easily maintained system. By implementing an international standard DALI system the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources have an energy efficient system with advanced features to service them now and in the future.

For more information contact DALI Control.