Lighting System Helps Optimize Resident Care and Comfort at St. Ann’s Nursing Facility

St. Ann’s skilled nursing facility in Rochester, New York 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 them centralized lighting control for all interior common spaces including nursing stations, dining rooms, day rooms, offices and corridors. Multiple lighting control strategies leveraged across the spaces including occupancy sensing, time scheduling, personal control and daylight harvesting, were used to meet their energy-efficiency and comfort level objectives.

Here’s a look at how they achieved their goals.

Resident and Staff Comfort Optimized

A time scheduling control strategy with pre-set lighting scenes is used 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 to support care partner safety while minimizing the disruption to residents that are sleeping.  At 7:00 AM, the hallway lights are scheduled to come on at a 70% level to help residents wake. Automated light levels pre-programmed on a time schedule provide a comfortable living and working atmosphere for residents and staff.

Employees now have personal control of the lighting in their individual workspaces. This lighting control strategy enables them to easily customize light levels on their laptops or PCs using pre-set lighting scenes, a slider tool and ‘save setting’ button. Staff that had previously experienced headaches due to the brightness of LEDs or computer glare can now dim their lights to a lower level helping improve their comfort and productivity.

Energy Consumption Significantly Reduced

Occupancy sensors play a significant role in reducing energy use. They are installed throughout the common areas including individual staff offices and medical rooms. These sensors enable significant energy savings because lights are not left ON when the space is unoccupied. They also provide a level of safety as they trigger lights to turn ON when someone enters the space. Sensors also override time scheduling when lights are scheduled to be OFF, but a person walks into a space.

Pre-programmed lighting levels and time scheduling is also used throughout the non-resident medical floors to reduce energy usage. They automatically turn ON at 6:00 AM and OFF at 7:00 PM when most office areas are unoccupied.

Glass windows and walls are plentiful throughout the facility. Each resident floor has a dining area with a west-facing wall of glass windows, and the admissions area, day rooms and craft rooms also benefit from natural light through large windows. Using the ENCELIUM LMS 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 $6200 per month, a 62% savings as compared to pre-installation costs. In addition, the ENCELIUM LMS is a technology solution that creates an atmosphere that is beneficial to residents and the staff that cares for them. 

To learn more, download the case study below.