Energy Efficiency As Part of Overall Building Safety

For Building Owners Looking for Ways to Improve Building Safety – Energy Efficiency Upgrades Have Safety Built In

While businesses begin to re-open, the situation is anything but business-as-usual, as portfolio owners search for ways to improve building safety to get people back to work without compromising employee wellness. Here at Ally, we’ve been on the front lines of this effort from the very beginning, offering streamlined temperature reading technology, portable UV-C sanitation, and HVAC installed bi-polar ionization and UV-C air purification.

However, outside of these Covid-19 specific measures, it is also worth mentioning that more general-purpose energy efficiency upgrades also contribute to a building’s safety and bottom line. LED lighting upgrades and retrofits that include installing sophisticated sensor networks provide the foundation for a safer work environment in general. Still, in addition, they also offer the technology structure for gathering building intelligence that can help with loss prevention, crime reduction, and Covid-19 specific social distancing compliance.

Sensors Help Keep Buildings AND People Safe

In these unprecedented times, building owners are grappling with unexpected issues related to occupancy. Questions like, “how do you keep employees safe when they are working inside a building?” clash with questions like, “how do you keep your building safe while all or part of the building is shut down?” Owners and facility managers searching for answers need look no further than sensor-backed lighting as a solution that can help with both of those issues.

Sensors Mitigate Trespassing, Vandalism and Theft

When it comes to loss prevention, vandalism, and theft, an empty building is a vulnerable building. Fortunately, sensors connected to lights and cameras can help mitigate the potential trouble that comes when a building is unoccupied. Sensors can track the presence of individuals through motion activation, alerting building managers when there are people where they don’t belong. Building managers can monitor movement within a building and track activity in real-time. Meanwhile, sensor-enabled cameras can capture exactly what is happening so that security teams can be deployed to the precise location of the perpetrators immediately and effectively.

Sensors Make Health and Wellness Technology Updates Easy

On the other hand, building owners are also trying to figure out ways to reconfigure space to ensure their buildings are safe enough to resume operations. Setting up adequate social distancing in offices and industrial settings can be challenging, especially when space is already at a premium. Sensors attached to lighting can help by tracking occupancy, travel paths, and space utilization patterns. It’s much easier to plan for workplace safety when insights like these help guide the process. Building owners can identify over-and underutilized spaces and then use occupancy patterns to even out the usage ratios for maximum efficiency.

Better Lit Buildings Help Improve Building Safety ALL the Time

Sensor-backed LED lighting upgrades don’t just provide a safer work environment in times of crisis. Instead, they provide ongoing safety benefits that promote employee wellness now and in the future. Because LED lights last far longer than older lighting types, maintenance workers automatically spend less time changing burnt-out luminaries, a job that requires working at dangerous heights and traditionally included handling glass that was prone to breakage. Meanwhile, buildings with outdated lighting plans designed for prior occupancy configurations, coupled with poor general lighting quality, create an environment where injuries related to unseen obstacles and eye strain are prevalent.

LED lights also last longer on backup power, which gives people more time to safely exit a building if an emergency takes a building offline. Sensors that automatically switch lights on and off keep workers from stumbling around in the dark, and integrated heat mapping can help with the development of predictive safety measures that can help reduce accidents involving machinery.

Sensor Backed Lighting Retrofits Can Help Finance Return-to-Work Specific Building Upgrades

As safety champions, sensor-backed lighting is a winning combination, undoubtedly, but what makes this combo even more beneficial is the money it saves building owners in energy and maintenance costs. With proper planning and guidance, a LED lighting upgrade can offset the cost of other more specific wellness upgrades, including HVAC UV-C light sanitation and hyper-efficient temperature screening at site entry points – measures that may become a mandatory and permanent part of building management.