Lighting System Helps Optimize Care and Comfort at Nursing Facility

St. Ann’s skilled nursing facility in Rochester, NY, undertook a major renovation to transform every resident floor into a household model, creating a community that elders would recognize as home. Several goals were set for the project including optimizing the comfort levels of residents and staff and reducing energy consumption. A centrally-managed, flexible lighting system that leveraged the latest technologies was identified as a renovation requirement.

The facility chose the Encelium Extend Light Management System (LMS) which provided centralized lighting control for all interior common spaces including nursing stations, dining rooms, day rooms, offices and corridors. Multiple lighting control strategies were used across the spaces including occupancy sensing, time scheduling, personal control and daylight harvesting, to meet the facility’s energy-efficiency and comfort level objectives.

For residents, the solution used a time scheduling control strategy with pre-set lighting scenes in the nursing stations and corridors leading to resident rooms on each floor. Multiple occupancy sensors are also installed on each floor. If there is no movement in the hallways at 6:00 PM, the light level is scheduled to decrease from 70% to 30% to help residents rest.  When a nurse walks into the hall at night, an occupancy sensor triggers the system to increase the light level slowly. In the mornings, the hallway lights are scheduled to come on at a 70% level to help residents wake.

Employees now have personal control of the lighting in their individual workspaces. They can customize light levels on their laptops or PCs using pre-set lighting scenes, using a slider tool and ‘save setting’ button.

Occupancy sensors play a significant role in reducing energy use at St Ann’s. Pre-programmed lighting levels and time scheduling are also used throughout the non-resident medical floors to reduce energy usage. Glass windows and walls are plentiful throughout the facility. Using the system’s daylight harvesting capabilities, the lights in each of these areas automatically dim when sufficient ambient light is present from natural light which helps save energy used.

By leveraging multiple control strategies the nursing facility reduced its energy costs by at least $6,200 per month, a 62% savings as compared to pre-installation costs.