Urbis News

Urbis Lighting Lands Queen's Award

Article Date: 21st April 2001

Urbis Lighting has been granted a Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation for 2001. The company has made a major impact on society through its outstanding innovation with the Sealsafe optical unit. Patrick Baldrey, Managing Director, says that, "The Sealsafe optical unit has grown from a great product innovation into more of a philosophy for lighting. Much of this is now seen in current street lighting practice, which is being incorporated into revised codes and standards. When it was first introduced 15 years ago, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, it represented a major break with conventional street lighting practice.

The design of the optical unit as a water and dust tight unit to IP66 was unique and has removed the need for internal cleaning, as tests over subsequent years have shown. For residential streets where crime is an issue, the robust construction of the Sealsafe unit has dramatically reduced the damage rate. These factors have made a significant impact on local authority maintenance costs.

Energy costs using the high performance Sealsafe unit proved to be significantly lower, because the high level of optical efficiency means that significantly less units are needed to light a given area. This also has meant that lighting scheme costs were reduced, as well as the energy bill. Applications for the Sealsafe approach have been adapted from conventional single-unit street lighting luminaires to multi-unit installations to light roundabouts and wide motorways.

The reflector design has also given designers greater freedom to explore the use of different lamps like the white light CDM-T, preferred in many residential areas.

Light pollution can be a major nuisance, but, with the lamp positioned deep in the Sealsafe reflector, Urbis was able to demonstrate that light projected ‘above the horizontal’ from the light source could be ‘designed out’. Astronomers campaigning to eliminate upward light spillage have already recognised this Urbis achievement with their own award.

Light 'backspill' from street lights into bedroom windows has long been a nuisance and deterred many engineers from adopting higher lighting levels. Urbis has produced many variants of the basic reflector design to achieve different light distributions to suit scenarios like this. Early trials of the low back-light variant were conducted by Devon County Council. Through research with criminologists, Urbis also established that good lighting reduces crime and also the fear of crime in men, women and children.

Patrick Baldrey concludes, "We are enormously proud to have been selected for this prestigious award, but owe thanks to our customers who have encouraged us to keep solving their problems and to our staff who have all contributed in their own way to this success."