Lighting Control for Education
Top lighting challenges in learning environments
Maintaining optimal indoor conditions
A great learning space is more than just bright enough. Monitoring and responding to conditions such as CO₂ levels and air quality is critical for ensuring healthy, learner-friendly indoor environments.
Adapting spaces for diverse activities
Modern education requires flexible rooms for a variety of activities. Staff often find it difficult to create the perfect setting for each task—from quiet reading to dynamic group work—when they lack simple, quick-to-change lighting scenes.
Balancing energy use with comfort
Our systems shouldn’t use any more energy than is absolutely necessary. This means preventing wasted energy in empty rooms or when daylight is plentiful, but ensuring the light quality is high and features work reliably when required.
Application areas for lighting control
CLASSROOMS
Flexible lighting supports every lesson, from lectures to group projects. Easily adjust light levels to reduce glare for presentations or create a focused atmosphere for tests, helping students stay engaged.
CORRIDORS
Lighting provides safe navigation while saving energy. Presence detection ensures corridors are well-lit when in use and automatically dim down or switch off to avoid wasting power when empty.
LIBRARIES
Create a comfortable environment for quiet study and reading. Lighting control reduces glare on screens and pages, while also using daylight harvesting to maintain consistent light levels and save energy.
STAIRWAYS
Smart lighting ensures safety on every step. Automated controls turn on lights as people approach, providing clear visibility and peace of mind, then turn them off again to save electricity.
CANTEENS
Use lighting to set the right atmosphere, whether it’s a bright, energetic lunch service or an evening event. Adjustable scenes create a welcoming space while ensuring lights are off during off-hours to save energy.
SPORTS HALLS
High-quality, glare-free lighting supports a variety of activities, from basketball to gymnastics. Use simple scene controls to get the right light for each sport, while presence detection prevents energy waste when the hall is vacant.
The Helvar Difference: Education
At Helvar, we have decades of experience in creating lighting solutions to meet the unique challenges of education. See how our solutions improve building efficiency and student comfort at thousands of inspirational learning environments around the world, such as the University of Bristol!
Helvar Solutions
Intelligent Lighting Control
Whether for new buildings or retrofit projects, Helvar offers a broad portfolio of lighting control products to help meet diverse needs.
Monitoring and Maintenance
Monitor the health of your system and minimise the impact of any disruptions with Helvar’s digital tools and local service teams.
Environmental Sensing
Measure a range of environmental conditions through your lighting system, giving you access to valuable data in a cost-effective way.
Explore our education case studies
Case study:
Pajarinranta childcare centre, Finland
Kemi’s new childcare centre required a flexible and energy-efficient lighting system. Helvar Insights provides remote management and monitors building occupancy, which helps optimise space allocation and saves energy. The system also sends automated maintenance alerts.
Case study:
Voxnadalens Gymnasium, Sweden
Facing a need to replace fluorescent lighting, the school required a flexible, scalable, and energy-efficient system that would avoid expensive rewiring. A wireless Helvar solution was chosen for this purpose, which significantly reduced cabling costs and disruption, leading to a 25% reduction in energy use.
Case study:
City of Gdynia, Poland
As part of a city-wide modernisation program, Gdynia’s schools needed modern lighting to reduce energy use in mid-20th-century buildings. Helvar’s DALI system, with its scalable architecture and industry standard protocol, adapted easily to the unique layouts and older infrastructure, improving both efficiency and student wellbeing.
Case study:
Valteri School, Finland
This historic barracks building needed to be renovated into a modern educational facility for special needs students. Helvar’s DALI-2 solution was chosen to deliver features such as individual classroom control with adjustable light intensity and color temperature, which helps support the wellbeing of students with varied needs.
Case study:
JMS Learning Hub, University of Glasgow
The University of Glasgow needed a smart, open-protocol lighting system for its new learning hub. Helvar’s DALI-based system provides full building control, reports faults automatically, and offers API connectivity to other building systems, supporting the university’s “Smart Campus” vision and occupant wellbeing.
Case study:
Gelişim University, Turkey
When converting a former office building into a university campus, the main challenge was repurposing spaces with cabling limitations. DALI technology from Helvar was chosen for its cost-efficiency, simple installation, and flexibility, allowing the university to create diverse lighting scenarios and meet strict energy and safety requirements.