One project that has been undertaken by Mike Riley’s team at Estates and Buildings is to adjust the Passive Infrared Sensors (PIRs) in the toilets so that now the lights come on only when you enter a cubicle rather than as you pass by.
There are more lighting projects in the offing (see the list of projects and the POE report), including the lights in the some of the coffee areas that never go out.
And although we don’t have control over all lights in the building, we can help by turning off office and meeting room lights when leaving.
It’s great to finally see these progressing. One of the problems with lighting in this building is that it works against its occupants. There’s the frustration of being to off lights in public areas, even when you know they’re not going to be used. In the likes of meeting rooms, light switches are hidden behind equipment and not by the door as you’d expect. These make it harder to develop habits around lighting – occupants begin to expect lights to go on and off without their control. My conditioned impulse to turn off lights is weakened since moving, as it’s not consistently rewarded…
That’s an interesting point about light switches being hidden or in unexpected places. Perhaps a sign on the back of the meeting room door reminding people to turn off lights & equipment would be helpful? At Forrest Hill we had stickers placed above light switches saying that the switches should be turned off either (a) when leaving the room (b) at the end of the day or (c) never. After the stickers went up, I recall lights did seem to go down more often and electricity use went down by the order of 10% – a surprisingly large change. Perhaps we could put up some of the (a) type stickers in meeting rooms and perhaps offices?