The Benbow Group Ltd., Newton Abbot, UK

a busy office

Cabinetmaker renovates offices with lighting to create more productive environment.

Introduction

The Benbow Group’s meticulous work is understated yet impossible to ignore: The prestigious joinery and metalworker firm creates custom-made cabinets and display cases for premium watch brands, notable High Street stores, and museums.

The company’s new manufacturing facility came with an attached office block, giving Benbow the opportunity to retrofit the offices with the latest wireless lighting technology. The purpose was to create a productive and worker-friendly workplace environment with energy-efficient, easy-to-use controls—a place to truly support Benbow’s highly trained workers, who spend their days drawing up plans and creating refined cabinetry. At the same time, the design needed to be intuitive to use, easy to install, and budget-friendly.

The Challenge

Benbow’s Director, John Bailey, had planned to approve a very basic lighting scheme. But upon being introduced to Lutron at a seminar hosted by the UK’s National Association of Shop Fitters, he decided to pursue a design that provided all the values of quality lighting and personal control.

“It was timely that we went there as we were about to change all the lighting in our offices to LED,” Bailey recalls. “Through going into Lutron in London, I saw the things that

could go wrong with not having dimmable or controllable lights. We’ve got some very precious staff and we didn’t want to lose them by moving them into a new facility and finding out the lighting wasn’t good.”

The solution needed to include not only controls capable of controlling LEDs, but also occupancy and vacancy sensors, timeclock programming, remotes, and daylight harvesting. Vive, with its simple and scalable attributes, fit the bill.

The Solution

Sherwoods, Benbow’s contractor, hadn’t used Vive before, but project manager Ben Arnold quickly grasped its benefits. He was familiar with wireless systems on a variety of hardware, such as closed-circuit cameras and security systems, but using a wireless protocol for such a large system of lighting controls was different. And installation? He had his concerns.

“They all appreciate having much better lighting and lighting control.”

—John Bailey, Director, Benbow Group

“I was curious about using a wireless system,” he says. The installation, he added, turned out to be as easy as promised. “Until we got the system up and running, I never thought it would be that easy to set up.”

Benbow opted for a variety of Vive controls.

The corridors feature occupancy sensors, which turn the lights on when people are present.

Pico remotes allow for personal control in the smaller offices, and vacancy sensors shut the lights off when their workers depart. Daylight sensors were also installed at the glass-fronted main entrance, where they’ve proven a beneficial addition, says Arnold.

There was one hitch: an unforeseen programming issue. Lutron was “fantastic”

in helping to address this issue quickly, says Arnold, so installers did not lose more valuable time.

Results

The Benbow staff moved into the new building in the autumn. Bailey, the Director, is very pleased with the early returns.

“At the old premises we had old fluorescent lighting, and we’ve now gone to LED, along with dimmability and occupancy and vacancy sensors,” he says. “So we’re expecting some pretty huge savings.”

In addition, with the Vive app, the Benbow facilities team now are able to change settings on their own, such as reducing the length of time-outs, without having to pay a manufacturer.

More important, though, is the reaction from the employees. As Bailey noted, one of the primary reasons for going with Vive and the control it offers was the chance to provide the right environment for his workers. The Vive installation has made that possible, he says.