Single lamp control via power line carrier

THE EXPERIENCE

Some years ago the Municipality of Carpi decided to test new technologies on new plant of public lighting. Thee Studio had the charge to study promising and serious technologies. He found them in OPERA system, a complete and modular solution to meet users' need.
Particularly the Municipality of Carpi  was interested in monitoring all the data concerning lamp functioning to find in advance and plan all maintenance works. Then, not only damage signalling, but all necessary to advance incipit phenomena.
There were many different monitoring systems of luminaries on the market, but OPERA system had unique characteristics allowing the user to determine the lamp rate wear, the presence of possible irregular voltage droops, the operating hours of each single component. These information allow the user to plan carefully each intervention and to carry out that “optimum” planned routine maintenance  representing the optimization point of costs.

THE SOLUTION

Public lighting plant is composed of 255 lighting points.
39 of them are equipped with SHP 250W lamps on 9m poles,170, of 100W lamps on 8m poles, 6 150W lamps on 9m poles, the remaining 40 ones of 70W SHP on 4m poles.
The user can program alarm thresholds, lamp by lamp. Particularly the values timing an alarm due to capacitor failure, lamps in short circuit, switch on time/hour average, feeding lamp voltage (maximum and minimum), lamp current (maximum and minimum).
All poles are equipped with relay (LPC type), 253 total poles installed, divided into six control groups. Each group has a certain number of lamps. Then at a certain group you can pair settings, alarms or controls (switch on or off).

THE BENEFITS

The plant began definitively working in the middle of 2003 and delivered to the user with mutual satisfaction. We're collecting all data. Meanwhile, thanks to the contemporary installation of an upstream source controller, an yearly saving average of about 28% as it regards the consumed energy has been achieved. The trial in progress will also allow the right evaluation of lamp life.