An enjoyable day at the Surveyor conference

An interesting and excellent range of papers presented at this week’s Surveyor / ILP Highway Lighting Conference in Leicester.

The key note address given by Councillor Rory Palmer, Cabinet Lead and Deputy City Mayor for Leicester City Council gave a concise and to the point address acknowledging the problems Authorities have with budgets but hit the right note by stressing the importance of calling on competent technical experts to provide innovative solutions to the problems.

Alistair Scott, the Chair of the BSi 5489 review panel then updated us with the direction of the new standard due out later this year. This was followed by Nick Smith looking at the specific aspects of the lighting of conflict areas and Steve Fotios then addressed the requirements for pedestrians to have the same visual benefits under any light source used for residential roads and the application of S/P ratios. Both Nick and Steve’s aspects that will form part of the new standard of which a draft will be issued for public comment shortly.

Peter Harrison discussed the development of the forthcoming ILP Professional Guide (PG) for seasonal lighting and attachment’s and Keith Henry (VP Technical) the PG regarding Central Management Systems, both of which are due for publication before the ILP Summit. Alistair then took to the podium again, standing in for Dave Burton, discussing how a lighting professional may look to demonstrate their competency through an approach being implemented by the ILP.

The conference finished off with Glyn Williams of Cornwall updating us on the progress of their invest to save programme, lessons learnt and savings actually achieved and what they are looking to next in the way of profiling. I then closed the conference explaining the LoTAMB (London Transportation Asset Management Board) new framework documents to aid an Authority develop a Lighting Value Management Model such that their funds can be targeted at precisely the areas and equipment that requires highest attention which can be down loaded from the LoLEG web site and will soon be issued as a national document through the ILP and LoTAMB.

Light nuisance, if we cannot practically measure intensity how do we assess a nuisance complaint?

Over the past weeks I have been discussing the measurement light nuisance with Carl Gardner the editor of the ILP’s lighting journal.

Essentially light nuisance is defined as two issues, the first is the vertical illuminance onto a window and the second is the intensity of the light towards an observer within their premise. The limitations for these are given with CIE 150: ‘Guide on the limitation of the effects of obtrusive light from outdoor lighting installations’ and the ILP’s own document ‘Guidance on the reduction of obtrusive light’’ which is essentially a distillation of the detailed CIE Standard.

Vertical illuminance (lux) is easy to measure and just requires a suitable calibrated illuminance meter, intensity (cd) however is very difficult if not totally impracticable to measure and an illuminance meter (cd/m²) cannot be used for this purpose.

In saying this measurement of intensity may be achieved by the masking of the illumination meter by a matt black tube, say a section of drainage pipe with small holes at each end aimed at the light source. The intensity can then calculated by multiplying the measured illuminance by the distance squared. This approach is prone to many errors and really is not practicable especially if you are looking to complaints regarding sources some distance away.

So how can we effectively look to measure any complaint of lighting nuisance if one of the key aspects cannot effectively be measured in the field? We can look to model it within software such as Calculux but that will require all of the ‘as installed’ installation details of the scheme to do this and again this is not practicable to collect so we are at an impasse, we have a defined limitation which causes compliant but cannot be measured.

A practical solution may be to redefine the glare aspect of nuisance in terms of luminance and then a suitable luminance meter could be used but would this be right?

And there it ends really, what do we look to do, if you are interested in discussing please comment within this Blog or alternatively please go to Linked-In where a discussion has been opened under the Lighting Designer Group following on from recent discussions within the group on sky glow.

A new feature for the ILP

A new feature for the ILP, a presidential blog site.

This is a direct result of attending an excellent event run by the ILP in London on the 13th June regarding the use and impact of social media and I would like to congratulate the YLP members who set up and ran this event for those of us who until last night were not that familiar with Blogging, Tweeting and the like.