Customer: Kienle & Spiess
Location: Tokod, Hungary
Partner: BenDal
Environment: Manufacturing/Warehouse
Previous Lighting: Metal Halides, Fluorescent Tubes
Solution: DLE intelligent LED luminaires with LightRules Lighting Control & Business Intelligence Software
Savings: 83.5% Lighting-related
Maintenance Savings: €6,000 annual

Located in Hungary, Kienle + Spiess is the European market leader in electric steel processing. At the Tokod site, Kienle + Spiess Hungary Kft. has manufactured electric motors and fixed and rotating parts for more than 10 years.

Opportunity

Kienle + Spiess had long sought to modernize their lighting solution. In addition to excessive energy usage and poor lighting conditions throughout the Tokod manufacturing facility and warehouse, frequent maintenance of their legacy system interfered with productivity. The team assessed several new lighting options, and ultimately determined that LightRules and the Intelligent LED Lighting System from Digital Lumens would deliver the greatest opportunity to truly modernize operations and improve energy efficiency, productivity, and employee safety and comfort.

Why Digital Lumens?

In addition to the obvious, energy-based benefits of LEDs, the selection of Digital Lumens intelligent lighting was attributed to the built-in sensors, which made it possible for Kienle + Spiess to take advantage of skylights in the upgraded locations and apply occupancy sensing and daylight harvesting to help maintain the necessary light levels and improve energy efficiency even further.

Immediate Benefits: Energy Efficiency through Intelligent Control

In the first three months, the Tokod site realized more than 80% savings in lighting-related costs. During the first six months of operation with the Digital Lumens system, more than 120,000 kWh were saved compared to the previous lighting system.

The savings were achieved through Digital Lumens’ precise luminaire control, which allowed the Kienle + Spiess team to introduce progressive dimming and task tuning to automatically adjust light levels from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, and luminaire -to- luminaire, thereby maximizing savings and employee safety and comfort. This control also allowed for customized settings across various workspaces, such as the manufacturing floor and warehouse.

The LightRules Effect: Unprecedented Insight

Kienle + Spiess sought more from their lighting update than energy efficiency and found additional benefits through the use of Digital Lumens’ LightRules lighting control and business intelligence platform.

In addition to controlling luminaire behavior, including light levels and customized active/inactive settings, the team leveraged LightRules reports to better understand occupancy trends and to create new rules that customized lighting based on those reports. The result was more than 65,000 kWh saved within the first three months of system implementation.

Among the improvement opportunities that LightRules reporting helped to introduce:

• To accommodate fast-moving forklifts and ensure a safe, well-lit environment, ramp up speeds for some lights were adjusted from three seconds to one second.
• To improve lighting quality and employee comfort, ramp down speeds were increased from two to 15 seconds in the storage area, and from six to 60 seconds in the production area. To offset the extended lighting usage in these areas, Kienle + Spiess reduced the dimming response delay and lowered the inactive level. As a result, even greater savings are expected.
• With three months of occupancy trends and energy usage data in hand, daylight harvesting settings were further honed, resulting in an increase of the initial savings rate from 80% up to 83% within a two-week period.

Long-Term Value

Insight & Control
Through Digital Lumens sensor-rich intelligent LED system and LightRules reporting, Kienle + Spiess identified unique occupancy trends, and further honed lighting settings to drive additional savings.

Safety & Comfort
Kienle + Spiess utilized Digital Lumens’ progressive dimming and task tuning functionality to deliver qualitative improvements to employees through better-lit, safer workspaces, and more suitable task-based lighting levels.

Savings
Kienle + Spiess realized an 83.5% reduction in lighting-related energy costs, along with an estimated savings of more than €6,000 annually by eliminating the need for costly maintenance that interfered with productivity.