Woodland car park

The brief

The Woodland underground car park: a low ceiling, round-the-clock operation, two driveways and parking bays along the walls. The targets are modest, 75 lx on the driveways and 50 lx in the bays, but this is exactly where a dip between luminaires reads as a black hole and the driver brakes where there was no need to.

The entrance is a task of its own. The eye moves from daylight into darkness, and the transition zone needs a level noticeably higher than the car park itself, or the driver spends the first seconds after the ramp effectively blind.

The client also wanted a pattern: for the client the car park is part of the customer journey, not a service space.

What we did

We used around 180 linear SVO 01 Line Ultra 40W units with a 30×40 mm section, because on a 3 m ceiling the size of the luminaire matters. The runs go continuously along the driveways and are doubled up at the entrance and on the ramp.

The pattern was made from the geometry of the run itself rather than from decorative trim: the luminaires are laid out in a zigzag along the driveway, and the same zigzag works as a direction indicator.

The outcome

The installed load is ≈ 7.2 kW against ≈ 18 kW: with round-the-clock operation, a difference of ≈ 11 kW is a noticeable figure in the annual bill.

There is no more light than before: 200 fluorescent fittings at 2×36 W are ≈ 1,340,000 lm of nominal lamp flux, 180 Line Ultra 40W units are ≈ 1,008,000 lm by the IES file. The calculated ≈ 90 lx on the driveways against ≈ 45 lx does not come from the sum of lumens but from a continuous run leaving no gaps between luminaires, and from nominal lamp flux and the output of a dusty louvred housing being different quantities. We have no illuminance measurements from a handover record.

Figures marked ≈ are estimates and are being confirmed against the handover record.

Solution for this facility type