By building type

The decision is different in each building type

Not the same page with the noun swapped. In a cold store, lighting is paid for twice. In a care home, there is no empty window to work in. In a listed building, consent rather than capital sets the ceiling. Those are different problems with different answers.

An empty open plan office with a suspended ceiling grid of recessed LED panels and daylight along the window perimeter. — Illustrative image generated with AI. Not a photograph of a building we have worked on.

Each page below had to name something true of that building type and of no other before it was written. Where it could not, the page was not built, which is why there is no separate page for a distribution centre or a shop.

One page each, and what only that page says

The line under each is the thing that page covers and no other page on this site does.

12 entries

Warehouse and distribution The building type where lighting alone most often does the job. Mounting height rather than floor area sets the fitting count and the access equipment, and a shed specification should follow the racking aisles rather than even floor coverage. Read Offices The building type where timing matters more than specification. Timing the work to a void, a Cat A refurbishment or a fit-out saves more than any specification choice, and the lease decides who is permitted to change the fittings at all. Read Retail units Two lighting jobs in one unit, and a tenant who cares how it looks. A single unit contains two lighting jobs on two different paybacks, and the occupier holds an aesthetic veto over the half with the fastest return. Read Multi-let industrial The hardest one to fund, because whoever pays is not whoever benefits. Each unit is separately assessed and separately let, so the landlord carries the obligation while the tenant receives the reduced electricity bill the upgrade would produce. Read Cold storage Lighting pays twice here, because every watt you save is also heat you do not have to remove. A watt of lighting in a refrigerated space is paid for twice, once at the fitting and again at the refrigeration plant that has to remove the heat it produces. Read Care homes Hot water dominates, the building is never empty, and the residents set the constraints. The building is occupied every hour of every day by people who cannot be decanted, so the cheap working window that every other building type has simply does not exist here. Read Hotels Rooms are sold by the night and empty most of the day, so control beats fittings. Each bedroom is a separately controlled zone that is empty for most of the day whether or not it is sold, so the saving is in linking energy to occupancy rather than in the efficiency of any fitting. Read Schools Six empty weeks a year make this the easiest building type to work in, if you plan a year ahead. A six-week fully empty summer holiday recurs every year on a fixed published date, which is a guaranteed and repeatable working window no commercial building type ever gets. Read Gyms and leisure centres If there is a pool, ventilation and dehumidification dwarf everything else in the building. A pool hall must be continuously dehumidified and ventilated to protect the building fabric itself, so the dominant load exists to stop the structure corroding rather than to serve the occupants. Read Listed and historic buildings The constraint is consent, not cost, and it can cap what the building is able to reach. Consent rather than capital sets the ceiling here, so the work can end at a registered exemption rather than at a better rating, which is true of no other building type. Read Workshops and light industrial Light the bench, not the floor, and the person paying is usually the person working there. Lighting here is specified around benches and machines where close work happens, so the fitting count follows the task positions rather than the floor plate or the roof height. Read Restaurants and pubs The kitchen extract runs the building, and the dining room lighting is the product. A commercial kitchen extract system throws out conditioned air at high volume for the whole service period, so the building is deliberately losing heat it has just paid to produce. Read

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