Nothing beats being on site
Bali, 26th November 2014
It probably sounds like an open door statement, but nothing beats being on site to directly address site installation issues, specifically when we talk about landscape lighting. I have said it many times and say it again, we can’t design from just behind our desk! We can get the concept very close, the more experience, the closer you will be on what it ultimately will be, but the devil is in the details and therefore being onsite today and tomorrow with the engineering team as well as the lighting supplier (he finally received the his P.O!) allowed us to run through my design and specifications and understand what kind of challenges and hurdles we may face for the installation. I have to say that I love my Samsung Note for this type of work, you take a picture of the situation and you can use your stylus to mark up the installation requirements.
I am onsite at one of our hotel projects where we are upgrading the existing landscape lighting of the old wing and quite honestly it needs it! The current lighting is cheap, dodgy to say the least and there is a total unbalance of the lighting. The balance of brightness is wrong; there is no feeling a space, no visual guidance and basically no mood. Improving the lighting is not that difficult quite honestly, the difficulty was in educating the client about quality and the necessary steps required to improve the lighting environment. We went through that stage explained our thought process, the concept that ensued to improve the lighting and finally through several rounds of lighting specifications and budget and value engineering sessions to bring the implementation within a budget the client was happy to spent. Rather then cutting the quality of the fittings, already one of the key issues in the current landscape lighting, I opted for a quantity cut, maintaining the quality and pushing some lighting improvements of lesser importance to future implementation.
The purpose of this visit is to confirm lighting locations, installation details and do night time testing with the sample fixtures to make sure we have the right light output and light distribution. The thing with LED is that yesterday’s wattages and light distributions and performances have improved markedly, so retesting of what was specified more than a year ago is crucial. We will do that tonight…
Light Watch 5-201: Some of my Samsung Note 3 mark up notes…
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