Brignais is small city located 15 kilometers southwest of Lyon, France, in the Rhône-Alpes region. Situated among urban municipalities and rural villages, Brignais is home to 11,000 inhabitants who enjoy the historic preservation of an ancient fortified village combined with modernized infrastructure.
The combination of residential, public and pedestrian areas throughout the city center defines Brignais’ charming locale, and city officials wanted to maintain this atmosphere while incorporating an automated street lighting retrofit that will improve energy efficiency and inhabitant comfort and safety in all public areas.
The diverse street types and settings throughout Brignais motivated Lyon-based lighting design office Les Eclairagistes Associés (LEA) to select luminaries that could be installed on existing building walls without detracting from the appeal. Integration of all controllers was also necessary to meet energy savings objectives.
The city of Brignais selected Citylone’s street light management solution specially adapted for small cities and rural areas where autonomous lighting management is achieved by dimming luminaries in the middle of the night. The autonomous solution is recognized for its easy installation and ability to manage different groups of luminaries in DALI and simple system-wide configuration.
The installer, Serpollet, fitted selected luminaries with integrated lighting controllers (Citylone’s SL21 and SL31) that enable automatic operation and dimming according to street types and required luminosity.
Romain Donier Meroz, supervisor at Serpollet, said, “The new SL21 is more practical because it’s smaller (one and half module) and wiring remains simple. Its small size allows integration in Class II connection boxes and installation can remain IP2X.”
Throughout the city, Citylone controllers communicate via power line technology using LonWorks® open network communication protocol. With the street lighting system integrated into the existing electrical network, all devices can share data and be managed through a simple remote controller. The main advantage of Citylone’s autonomous solution is that it can evolve into a remote management system later with the addition of an iLon controller and sending new software to the nodes.
The project was completed in Dec ember 2013 with promising results. The overall project incorporated LED luminaries, combined with SL21 and SL31 which allowed a 36% increase in energy savings compared to the old installation. Furthermore, excellent uniformity of illumination and luminance allowed the city to reduce overall lighting levels with no adverse impact on public comfort or safety.
According to David Jusselme, project lead for Brignais’ city, “The system has allowed maximum optimization of lighting power needed. Thanks to modularity, the city has dared low lighting, thus with low energy consumption, which is finally convenient to all users.”