Ideal Industries Moves Into Lighting Market with Wireless Control System

Jim James, chairman and CEO, Ideal Industries Inc., Sycamore, Ill., and his product development team spent the last few days at Lightfair in New York promoting their Audacy wireless energy management system targeted for the retrofit, new construction, retail, and institutional lighting markets. 

Lighting is a new market for Ideal and James said the development team was challenged to “revolutionize our thinking beyond our core business of Wire-Nuts, but keep it just as simple to install and operate.” In six months, they had a working prototype using Ideal’s reliable push-in wire termination expertise and a proprietary, patent-pending wireless technology that can extend the life of battery-powered devices such as sensors and switches to 25 years.

“Our push-in wire termination expertise combined with our 915 MHz wireless technology makes it incredibly easy for facilities managers and building owners to deploy advanced lighting control solutions that had previously been difficult to implement,” said Nolan Bello, business unit manager, Advanced Wireless Solution.

Bello gave Lightfair attendees insight into an early Audacy installation at UCLA’s Athletics Dept. He said Audacy provides wireless control via a mobile app over multi-building lighting systems by automatically sensing and adjusting to ambient light, movement and room occupancy. Completed beta tests of the system have consistently delivered energy savings from 30% to more than 50%. He said the systems can be installed in one-eighth the time of competitive wired systems.

“The ability to adjust our lighting according to different situations is extremely important to maintaining an environment conducive to learning for our student-athletes,” said  Kevin Borg, assistant athletic director, Facilities and Project Management at UCLA, in the release.

He added that the UCLA athletic facilities are used up to 18 hours a day, and that they got 35% savings in their electrical lighting load by retrofitting Audacy’s wireless devices into existing light fixtures and infrastructure and then implementing Audacy’s occupancy, vacancy, task tuning and dimming approaches.