SignWeb | signweb.com

(March 2006) posted on Wed Mar 22, 2006

Hotel chains and casinos are cutting energy costs. Will they be after you soon?

By Darek Johnson

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With a voice as silky and southern as rhubarb pie, the captain talked over the aircraft's intercom. He chatted about storms, tornadoes and our delay. He said that, for now, we could use our cell phones to call ahead, to "tell your friends or loved ones that we'll be about ...aah, an hour late." We were on the taxiway at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport, waiting for a dark squall to pass.

Wade and I had flown in from LaGuardia two hours earlier. It was 10 p.m. and we were headed home. Over the past three days, we'd visited the LightFair Show in New York City and explored new lighting technologies. There, we talked to many lighting corporations' engineers and marketers, and confirmed what we suspected -- major lighting manufacturers are seriously working on technological advances for energy conservation. We also saw many innovative, sign-applicable lighting systems that may modernize existing sign-lighting methods. I was especially occupied with light-managing software -- daylight harvesting -- systems. You'll read more on this below.

You'd think, in an industry where manufacturers complain of lagging sales, someone would invent an ambient, light-controlling -- "daylight harvesting" -- system (hardware and software) for signs.

Ambient light controls are normally installed in buildings and hotels, but you seldom see such systems in signage. Daylight harvesting is, as you've guessed, the energy-saving technique that obtains the maximum possible yield from natural daylight before turning on the lights. In actual operation, you don't notice daylight harvesting because it's more of an easing of designated lights up or down as the ambient light rises or fades. Many signs have systems with on-and-off (day/night) sensors or timers, but you don't hear of sign-specific, daylight-harvesting hardware or software.

Daylight harvesting is a growing trend. You'll read about it in energy-conservation magazines as well as those dealing with architecture. For example, Architectural Record, in its May 2003 issue, reports on Telenor's new headquarters in Fornebu, Norway. Telenor, a European telecom giant, recently constructed a new headquarters that houses 7,500 employees. According to the magazine's report, the building's major systems -- HVAC, lighting, electricity -- are digitally connected to centralized energy-management system software.

Echelon Corp. (San Jose, CA), a supplier of infrastructure hardware and software to the device-networking market, built the Telenor system. Echelon's leading product is its LonWorks