Lux reports: A nationwide UK plumbing firm is upgrading the lighting at its central distribution warehouse in a move to save £100,000 ($157,000) a year in electricity costs.

Wolseley UK is replacing nearly 4,400 light fittings with LEDs at its Leamington Spa facility and hopes to complete the job by the end of September,  the company said.

The move to low-energy lighting will cut electricity consumption by around 236,000 kilowatt-hours during late afternoon and evening hours from November through February, and the total will equate to about 300 homes, Wolseley estimated.

It expects the savings will pay back total costs of around £500,000 ($786,000) in less than five years.

The company is financing the upfront costs in part with a £50,000 ($79,000) grant from the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Electricity Demand Reduction (EDR) programme.

DECC announced £20 million ($31 million) of available funds last year and awarded a first tranche earlier this year.

It is expected to announced a second tranche this month.

BusinessGreen has criticised the programme for not living up to its promise, as it allocated only £1.28 million ($2 million) of an available £10 million ($16 million) in the first round.

In addition to Wolseley, EDR recipients inlcuded Network Rail, BAE Systems, Tata Steel and others.

Wolseley UK operates a number of heating and plumbing operations including the retail chain Plumb Center. It is part of the £13 billion Theale, England-based international plumbing and heating giant Wolseley plc.

Novel Energy Lighting supplies a range of LED high bays, LED floods, LED corns, and other low energy lighting for warehouse applications. Call us today to discuss your needs: Tel: 0208-540-8287

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Photo of a Wolseley warehouse is from Wolseley.

Working throughout the project’s design and construction phases with architect Stanton Williams and stakeholders including Network Rail, London Underground, English Heritage and local authorities, the lighting design practice was tasked with creating a subtle but characterful space for an anticipated 140,000 users a day.

To balance functional and accent lighting, StudioFractal integrated its systems into surrounding buildings. As a result, the furniture and structural elements of the space are prominently defined at night and, in line with the project brief, ambient lighting from stainless steel columns makes Lewis Cubitt’s Grade I-listed Victorian station façade a focal point of the city’s first new public square for 150 years.

StudioFractal used in-ground Iglu luminaires from architectural LED manufacturer ACDC to light the ground floor of the façade.

The listed status of Cubitt’s façade meant the luminaire fixtures had to be located in existing mortar lines to protect the integrity of the façade, and approved by Borough of Camden conservation officers and English Heritage.

Based in Gatwick, West Sussex, Studio Fractal has previously delivered a complete artificial lighting solution for Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2, which won the Lux Award for Industrial and Transport Lighting Project of the Year in 2014.

Visit Novel Energy Lighting to discuss your architectural lighting needs. We can supply LED flood lights, wall washers, coving, and LED programmable RGB solutions such as the Color Kinetics range.

Narboni, a French urban lighting specialist whose company Concepto has designed more than 90 lighting projects in France and beyond, described Tehran’s current public lighting as ‘very basic’ and the lighting in its bazaars as ‘an amazing mess’.

Participants in Narboni’s workshop, including representatives from the Tehran Municipality, spent four days coming up with a lighting ‘masterplan’ for parts of Tehran’s historic centre.

The plan focused on the city’s Marvi and Oudlajan bazaars, which are currently being renovated, and the surrounding areas. Designers studied the local architecture, existing lighting, the kinds of activities that take place and how people move around by day and night, before coming up with designs.

 The four-day workshop – which took place during the second Iran Lighting Design Conference in Tehran in November – really only produced a ‘sketch’ of a lighting plan for the area, says Narboni, rather than a full masterplan. But he hopes that the government’s ambition to bring more tourists to the city, and the current renovation of the bazaars, will create an opportunity for ideas from the workshop to be taken forward.

 ‘In the public spaces in Tehran it’s really functional lighting, high-pressure sodium, 12 metres high, very simple and without any attention to anything. There’s no pedestrian lighting. And in the bazaar, it’s an amazing mess of projectors and fixtures, some of them 40 or 50 years old, cables and wires everywhere. Nothing is ever cleaned or taken away, they just add and add. Lots of the fixtures are 10 or 20 years old. It really needs a big job, because it’s not just the lighting that needs to be changed – it has to be cleaned and completely rethought.’

 For the first time since the 1970s, the number of outsiders who visited Iran last year was greater than the number of Iranians who travelled abroad. If tourism is to continue to grow, Narboni says Tehran needs to be made more hospitable at night.

‘It’s a big challenge for many huge cities that are not really appealing and friendly at night, he says. ‘At the moment people just stay in their hotels at night, because there’s nothing to see. The city needs to create things that can be seen at night. There are huge heritage buildings and palaces to be seen, so they need to make it possible to see these things at night. The bazaar closes at night, but if we could light some part of it, it could stay open later.

‘It would totally change the city. It would totally change the way of being in the streets and in the public realm.’

Narboni is optimistic that the plan will help the municipality to install better lighting. ‘They need help and expertise,’ he says, ‘but I hope they will go on doing things, to follow up our ideas and come up with a masterplan that’s more professional. Hopefully this is just a beginning.’