Langham Primary School. A complete school refurbishment in just 2 weeks
When Langham primary school decided to replace all its lighting in its two-week October half term, OMEC electrical contractors turned to us for the lighting design and products.
The project involved all the rooms in the school, including six classrooms, and the outdoor lighting.
Fast fit lighting refurbishment
Says Oli Jackson, managing director or OMEC: “The refurbishment was to provide the best possible learning environment, to save energy and to ensure that the school meets current fire regulations with emergency lighting and signage.
“Our challenge was to provide a fully compliant lighting installation and to do so in a very tight deadline over the half term, so that there was no disruption for the staff or children.”
Lighting design and installation
To help OMEC meet this tight deadline, we visited the site in advance to complete a full audit of what the school needed.
We then designed a lighting scheme and detailed room by room drawings showing what fittings go where, including all the emergency fittings and signage. And finally, we co-ordinated the delivery of products to meet the installations needs.
Once on site the contractors could follow the design drawing to install the lighting in the right locations. Push fit terminals and plug in wiring made each luminaire fast to install and plug in emergency kits allowed them to easily convert a fitting to an emergency light for fire safety.
Lighting design for education
Lighting in a classroom needs to help a good learning environment. It must light the tasks being carried out, the space and the faces of the people in the room so that a teacher can watch, notice and respond to the children.
While the illumination level for a classroom should be a minimum of 300 lux at desk height you must also provide 150 lux cylindrical illuminance to help light faces within the space for good communication. It also needs to provide a glare free environment, so any overhead fitting needs to have a unified glare rating (UGR) of 19 or less.
Low Glare Products
In this case the main ambient lighting was supplied by our Solis panel LEDs, which have a UGR of just 16 making them ideal for reading, writing and computer-based tasks. These were supplemented with our Plank decorative wall lights.
Meeting Fire Regulations
A key reason for the refurbishment was to ensure that the emergency lighting was fully up to date to meet the fire regulations. The contractors were able to easily adapt any Solis panel into an emergency fitting using our plug-in emergency kits.
We designed the emergency lighting system to also include emergency boxes, bulkheads and blades with the correct directional and exit signage.
Saving Energy
Although energy saving was not the main reason for this refurbishment, changing the lighting from mostly fluorescent and other light sources to modern LED luminaires will save the school an estimated 60% from its lighting bills. It means they can expect to get a return on their investment within 2 years.
To help save even more energy each classroom has a PIR sensor installed which means the lights will turn off after 30 minutes if it does not detect any movement. There are also sensors in the toilets which will turn the lights off after 10 minutes of no movement.
Outdoor and other rooms
Offering a complete suite of lighting products, we also provided LED battens for rooms without a ceiling grid and our anti corrosive Caiman battens for areas needing to withstand a harsh environment. And for outdoor lighting we supplied 30W floodlights for safety and security.
Concludes Oli Jackson: “To install a fully compliant lighting solution for a school in just two weeks is extremely challenging. Yet with Collingwood’s design expertise detailing exactly where to place all the different fittings, their delivery schedules and the ease of fitting their products meant that both children and staff could return to school after half term to a bright and welcoming learning environment.”
Products used at Langham Primary school
Solis Generation 2
Plank Wall Light
Caiman Anticorrosive
LED Batten
Emergency Exit Box
Emergency Exit Blade
Emergency Bulkhead
WL95 Bulkhead
Anthracite 30W Floodlights
