The tool is the fruit of a three-year joint project, just concluding, of the Lighting Group at Canadas Institute for Research in Construction and the Buildings Group at Natural Resources Canada. Their goal was to create a realistic energy savings predictor for office building design and make it available to a wide audience.
Developers say the tool provides a fast and reliable measure of the daylight available in peripheral offices. It then predicts the relative lighting energy savings that could be gained by using automated lighting and window blind controls, as opposed to standard on/off switches and manually managed blinds. Various geographic locations, building geometries and lighting schemes can be specified when using the tool.