A Lighting Control Rescue Story: Process Dealer Services Group

CE Pro is looking for installers and integrators to share their installation stories, like Kevin Mikelonis of Process Dealer Services Group. If you have a story you'd like to see published, please send it along with high-res photos to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

On a warm Friday afternoon at about half-past two, we received a call from an out of state electrical contractor named Ed asking rather desperately for help.

He had been working on an installation and was having some serious lighting control issues.

The home, which had just been occupied by the owners two weeks earlier, was nearly 20,000 square feet in three buildings. It was located only 150 miles from our offices in Paso Robles, Calif., but 700 miles away from Ed's homebase in Orem, Utah.

Ed's situation was urgent, as he was on the receiving end of a great deal of pressure from the general contractor about the malfunctioning lighting control system.

The Problems: Light Times and Location

The malfunctions described to me sounded simple to correct in the system programming, yet were causing significant inconveniences to the owners.

Ed described two items that were the cause of the stress that day:

1. All of the perimeter soffit lights and exterior sconces were coming on at full brightness in the middle of the afternoon and turning off sometime in the overnight hours. This functionality was apparently implemented at the request of the general contractor for security purposes during the final stages of construction. Now that the home was occupied, this functionality was not desirable especially since the 45 lighting control keypads throughout the home were not engraved or labeled. For the owners, each evening included a full tour of every room in the home along with a series of guesses and presses to determine which blank button would turn off the lights outside the room.
2. The lights in the Main Staircase could not be turned on or off from any known location in the home, but had been found to be on at random times during the day. No lighting in the stairs was a significant safety hazard and only increased the urgency which caused the call to our office.

Ed did not program the lighting control system and he didn't have access to the program file. He was told to install the lighting control system by the general contractor after being awarded the project.

The system was originally engineered for conventional switching and not for a lighting control system, and while the homeowner's A/V contractor including programming services for lighting as part of the install, he walked off the job before the home theater was completed with a six-figure deposit.

With the lighting control system program files and programmer missing in action, Ed turned to the local lighting control system manufacturer representative who referred him to us, as we welcome rescue work and abandoned projects.

After explaining to Ed what we believed would be the best case scenario and the potential risks, he agreed to our service rates and we were soon on the way to help.

(As a sidenote, Ed and his crew did an outstanding job wiring and terminating the 200 load lighting control system equipment without any engineered plans, load schedules, or panel reports. Ed wanted to help his client, and that made me want to help Ed.)

On the Job Site: Preparation and Promises

Just as dusk was settling in around Somis, California, we spotted our rescue project on a distant hillside, impossible to miss with nearly one hundred perimeter lights around all three buildings fully lit.

Waiting on-site for us was our new friend Benny, a local electrician that Ed relied on to perform much of the work during construction as well as service after the project's completion. Benny showed us where the vital parts of the lighting control system were located throughout the home's three buildings.

The house and property were amazing to see. After our tour, we met the owners and explained what we were going to do and how long each step would likely take. We also explained to Benny and the owners that we could not know if the system's program was password protected, which would prevent us from working with the existing program in any way.

Finally, we explained that until we attempted to extract the program from the lighting control processor, we could not know if the last upload to the processor was fully synchronized during compile. If it was not, the homeowner would have to decide if they wanted us to proceed with correcting the cited issues and upload the corrected program.

This might then contain issues previously corrected by the original programmer, resulting in the two cited issues being corrected and an unknown number of old issues being reintroduced into the program.