There are 1000’s of street lighting designs produced within the UK each year by varying levels of qualified people. You might be wondering what the different levels of qualifications might be and how they might benefit your particular project. This short blog has been put together to outline some of the hidden details people might not be aware of and how a lighting consultant can benefit you.
Types of lighting
Within the “developer world” you might have a project which requires an adoptable section 38 or adoptable section 278 lighting design, private courtyards or even a private access road. These would all require lighting design’s to be carried out in accordance with BS 5489 or BS EN 12464: 2014 (depending on if you have a road or car park or a Highway lighting design).
What can a lighting consultant do for us?
Every street lighting engineer has to start off learning the ropes from a mentor in a design office. This enables them to learn such as Lighting Reality and CAD software, along with the general design principles behind street lighting. The Institution of Lighting Professional’s (ILP) run a series of courses to enable a student to obtain a lighting diploma. Parts 1 to 3 of the course are residential week long modules and then Part 4 of the course is a project which is to be concluded at home. Each part of the residential course has an exam at the end of the course and the combined scores of all three courses, along with the Part 4 project, determine whether you pass the overall course and are issued with a lighting diploma from the ILP. The lighting diploma is generally considered as an essential requirement in street lighting design, in order to show competence and ensure you are CDM 2015 compliant when producing street lighting designs. Obviously just completing the course isn’t all you need, you cannot forget how important experience within the industry is, as long as its good experience!
When carrying out a street lighting design a professional and competent street lighting consultant would “optimise” a lighting design to use the fewest number of lighting columns as possible. Within the British Standards, for any given lighting class, there is a lux level window of tolerance that you are required to achieve in order to ensure the target roadway is not under lit or over lit. If you were to design to the upper limits of the lighting class you might for instance use 25 lighting columns to be compliant, however a competent lighting consultant would “optimise” the design perhaps using 20 lighting columns. When you factor in that a lighting column cost might be in the region of £1000 each, this would save the developer £5000 in installation costs alone! (Far out weighing the cost of the lighting design). A competent lighting consultant would also place lighting columns to avoid trees, windows and to be close to an LV main (electricity supply point), this would save further energy/electricity costs. The cost savings of using a street lighting consultant really do start to mount up compared to an unqualified engineered solution. One of our engineers regularly tells me the story of how we saved a client £42,000 in connection costs compared to the un-qualified design the client had initially been provided with.
A specialist lighting consultant is often far cheaper than a larger multi-disciplined consultant /contractor and can carry out the design in a much more efficient timescale whilst maintaining the quality and professionalism.
At MMA Lighting Consultancy Ltd we only use qualified ILP designers, who have completed their lighting diploma. Within in the design office, some individuals have over 20 years street lighting design experience, with the remainder of the team over 10 years each. We are also a SMAS Worksafe consultant and CQMS approved.
Get in touch
To contact MMA Lighting Consultancy about how we can assist with your projects and if you specifically require a section 38 lighting design, section 278 lighting design or private lighting design please follow one of the below links and one of our engineers will get back to you as quickly as possible.
Email: info@mma-consultancy.co.uk
Telephone: 0118 321 5636
