Lighting Controls

*This tutorial is written for Rhino 5.0+ (Windows) and DIVA 2.0+, and assumes you have Rhino & DIVA installed.

*Written June 2013 by Nicholas Kramer, Krame407@umn.edu

General Information About Lighting Controls :

Lighting Controls give you the ability to calculate power loads and lighting schedules for your model without the need to physically model any lights. The lighting controls replicate human behavior observed in the 2002 Lightswitch Study.

*NOTE - All Lighting Control calculations can only be run with a Climate Based metrics simulation, which can be found under the Daylight Grid Based tab in Metrics.

Getting Started :

We will start with the file example-Lighting Controls.3dm, which can be found at the bottom of the page.

Once the file has opened in Rhino, the first step is to go through setting your Location, Nodes and Materials. You can find a tutorial on how to do this on the Diva for Rhino webpage located here.

Step 1 : Open Lighting Controls

After the above settings have been set, navigate back to the Materials tab and select Lighting Controls.

You should now have this window open on your screen. There are two tabs in this window, Electric Lighting Off and Detailed Electric Lighting Controls.

Select Detailed Electric Lighting Controls

Step 2 : Set Nodes

Under this tab there are a few different variables to set.

The first thing is to select the Nodes the artificial lighting will affect. Start by clicking the Select Nodes button, this will bring you back to the Rhino interface where you can select the Nodes you want. Once you have selected all the nodes you want press Enter.

Step 3 : Select Lighting Options

The next thing to set is the Operation, this controls what type of light switch Diva will calculate for. The options are as follows:

Manual On/Off Switch - A standard, manually controlled On/Off light switch.

Switch Off with Occupancy - A light switch that is turned On by occupants, but automatically turns off when building is unoccupied.

Switch On/Off with Occupancy - A light switch that turns itself On/Off with occupancy.

Photosensor Controlled Dimming - A light switch that is turned On/Off by the occupants, but its intensity is controlled by a photosensor.

Dimming with Occupancy Off Sensor - A light switch that is turned On by occupants, but automatically turns off when building is unoccupied. The lights intensity can be controlled with a dimmer switch.

Dimming with Occupancy On/Off Sensor - A light switch that turns itself On/Off with occupancy. The lights intensity can be controlled with a dimmer switch.

For this tutorial lets start with the Manual On/Off Switch.

Step 4 : Adjust Lighting Variable

After you have selected your desired Operation, if you know you should have the option to set the Lighting Power, Lighting Setpoint, Ballast Loss Factor, and Standby Power. In most cases the default settings should be acceptable.

*NOTE - The only option available for the Manual On/Off Switch is Lighting Power.

Step 5 : Additional Lighting Options

If you want to see the difference between multiple lighting options, select Add Lighting Group and repeat the steps 2-4. For this tutorial we will add a Switch On/Off with Occupancy and a Dimming with Occupancy On/Off Sensor.

Once you have set up all of the lighting options you would like to run click Submit.

Step 6 : Running the Simulation

It is now time to run the simulation, Choose Metrics from the Diva menu within Rhino.

Navigate to the Daylight Grid-Based Tab, and choose Climate-Based.

Select the Metric and Occupancy Schedule you would like to run. Set any other settings you would like to adjust and click Run Simulation. For this tutorial we will use Daylight Autonomy for our Metric and weekdays9to5withDST.60min.occ.csv for our Occupancy Schedule.

Step 7 : Getting Your Results

After the simulation has been calculated, a page should open in your default internet browser that should look similar to this.

*Note - An internet connection is NOT required to load this page.

After running are simulations we can see the lighting schedule for the different switch types we had selected, it shows that the need for electric lighting generally decrease during the peak hours of the day. This information can be used to adjust window sizes and placement to reduce the buildings need for electrical lighting during the occupied hours. The first examples adds windows to the East side of the building in addition to the already existing windows on the South side, to try to reduce the need for electric lighting during the morning hours. The second example has windows on the East, West and South sides of the building to try to reduce the need for electrical lighting throughout the day.

We can now see from the results above that we have in fact reduced the need for electric lighting during the morning hours and overall.