Ordnance Survey

Southampton, United Kingdom

Ordnance Survey’s 16,000 m² exemplar head office outside of Southampton is a purpose built, highly energy efficient office building. It has been designed with innovative features that give it a striking appearance, resulting in nominations for numerous architectural awards. The development was designed to achieve a BREEAM Excellent rating and makes maximum use of natural resources and minimises greenhouse gas emissions wherever possible.

PDFOrdnance Survey Case Study

Applications Covered:

The Challenge

Thorlux Lighting was asked to replace the existing luminaires with an installation that would both complement the architecture of the building while providing a low energy and minimal maintenance lighting solution. The building comprises of open plan occupied office space over four floors, data centre, plant rooms, roof space and walkways.

Additional to this CBRE wanted the ability to offset the carbon dioxide (CO₂) released into the atmosphere as an indirect result of factory and selling activities and customers’ use of luminaires.

The Solution

High performance LED luminaires combined with the SmartScan wireless management system were selected. The luminaires have inbuilt energy usage monitoring and users have instant access to energy performance data via the SmartScan website. The information displayed on the website can be accessed from anywhere using a computer, laptop, tablet or smart phone.

Thorlux provided a professional on-site commissioning service to ensure that the products were configured to provide the desired performance and return on investment. The end user’s requirements and expectations were agreed prior to Thorlux’s site visit.

For CBRE one of the main advantages of using Thorlux products was the ability to carbon offset the CO₂ produced by the luminaires. In 2009 Thorlux designed an ambitious carbon-offsetting scheme to help compensate for the carbon dioxide (CO₂) released into the atmosphere as an indirect result of factory and selling activities and customers’ use of luminaires. To date the total number of trees planted is 165,687, sequestering over 41,000 tonnes of CO₂e over a period of 100 years.

74 %

Energy saving

From initial engagement to project completion, Thorlux Lighting has been brilliant. The sales engineers and lighting designers worked tirelessly to find improvements in the overall project, with ideas such as an overall reduction of fitting types and quantities by value engineering the installation, lifting the open plan lighting by 300mm to be in line with the suspended ceiling, adjusting all the rows of lighting within the open plan so they finished symmetrically. This led to a quality installation completed by the Thorlux Lighting team. The detail and precision that went into mounting the fittings is clearly shown, you can stand at the top of the open plan areas and look down the parallel rows of light line. The installation program was tight and working in a live office environment didn’t faze the installation team who remained flexible, friendly and professional throughout.

Reduction of CO₂ being the main goal for the project, the majority of the cardboard packaging was reused for the following week's deliveries. The installation was completed with more than 3000 fittings being replaced. The project was a great success with the client using the SmartScan portal to track and highlight energy usage and lighting patterns throughout the site.

Matthew Balcombe

Project Manager - CBRE | FM-FMSO