Retrofit replacement emergency lighting
with central testing location
for Education application
Background
St George’s College, Weybridge was founded in 1869 by a Belgium Catholic order of priests called the Josephites and was originally based in Croydon. St George’s still flourishes today and is now co-educational facility educating 1,600 boys and girls aged from 3 to 18 years on two sites.
After a recent installation of emergency lighting fittings, many of the emergency luminaires in the life safety system had failed the duration test and needed to be repaired or replaced. This triggered the school to rethink their options. What range of fittings would be best for the future? Longer lifetimes – should this be a priority? Can we monitor and test in a centralised system and manage the whole estate across multiple locations?
The Challenge - Previous premature failures
After being contacted by Chris Wright, Technical Director at Powercor who St. Georges had decided to work with us on this project, Clevertronics immediately knew that the main drivers and challenges for the school were the choice of quality long lasting products with reliability at their heart, the need to centrally monitor an emergency lighting system and testing of the system for regulatory compliance. Previous premature failures could expose them to non-compliance issues, and they could potentially have the same challenge across the rest of the estate.
Speaking with Chris Wright, “We experience the problems the school were facing a lot. Surely it’s a given that quality, lifetime and reliability are in all product specifications and installations when making your choice? We currently use the latest systems and technologies everyday to overcome the challenges that the facility management team at the school were experiencing. We take pride in continually educating ourselves in what’s available in the market, and importantly work hard in developing good relationships with the market leading manufactures to make sure what we offer does the job for our customers. For emergency lighting, that’s why we work with Clevertronics. What they do simply works and they always go the extra mile to support us”.
The Solution - Refrofit replacement lighting
Clevertronics, along with two other emergency lighting companies placed a bid for the project, however, only Clevertronics was able to provide a comprehension solution to meet all of the specifications, quality, installation and logistical challenges.
In phase one of this project we worked on a refrofit replacement lighting scheme. “We always try to re-use the current systems where possible, but replacing the complete system was the only way to deliver on the challenges set and futureproofing for additional requirements” said Chris from Powercor.
Our Clevertronics CLP range of emergency luminaries and exit signs were chosen and installed providing stability and a long life of product using our CLP Lithium Iron batteries lasting 8+ years. To overcome the challenge of monitoring and testing to meet the BS EN 50172 compliance requirements, Powercor installed and overlaid the Zoneworks XT centralisedmonitoring system with powerline communication. This is ideal for a retrofit application as no additional data cable is required, minimising disruption to the customer and reducing overall design, installation and maintenance costs.
The overall installed system comes with our Advantage Lifetime Support package (ALS) which ensures the system is continually updated and remains operational for the life of the system. Also, this system came with the energy saving and maintenance benefits of LED technology which is the standard technology adopted in all our luminaires.
The Result - Testing from one central location
After remotely commissioning the Clevertronics emergency lighting system, at both St Georges Junior School and Tennis Centre both sites of the school are being monitored and tested from the one central location using one IT infrastructure by the schools facility management.
The system is permanently connected in both sites giving live feedback on the status of their emergency lighting installation. They also have ability to set automatic test schedules in line with the compliance standards at times that is convenient for them. The customer now has worry free, life saving, automated emergency lighting compliance with savings of £34,500 over a minimum 8-year timeframe and an initial ROI for the system of 2.7 years.
Concluding, Chris Wright says “St. Georges will never be in a situation where they do not know the status of their emergency lighting system. Clevertronics products and systems do what they say they will do and commissioning, monitoring and testing really couldn’t be easier.”
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