you've probably noticed that electricity costs are on the way up to almost
astronomical levels that we've never seen before however with challenge becomes opportunity and we
think we've got a great opportunity to help you save energy and maintenance costs in the shape
of these surface mount Golf fittings from Robust so i had myself a little walk around town Gary
and i was amazed how many of these fittings are used these are the workhorse of the stairwell the
corridor the area out the back with the bins you know there's enough light there to do
the task these are functional fittings that are everywhere however i was amazed how many of them
still use no 2D tubes haven't even moved over to LED and that is what we're going to look at
today i've got a fantastic product that gives you loads of options and we think is a game changer
but as ever on eFIXX we like to get close to the products and you've been busy Gary in this area
absolutely yeah get given those Golf fittings from Robust and i think the first thing i thought well
i'm going to re-light the area where we keep our cables there was no light in here it was the area
nobody wanted to venture into so i've installed the conduit system behind me and three different
versions of the fittings within the range yeah and obviously you could say we were saving energy in
this area because it was incredibly dark and we tripped up and couldn't find the kales we want
so i think we've done a great job we've followed Ray Malone's rule of three we've put three to make
a bit of a feature of them as well but we've got some great features that we think you'll
love in this range we're going to look at the standout one which is this modular conversion
kit now we're going to look at the first option in that and is how you can convert between different
energy settings and different color temperatures so this is our selectable gear tray let's just
flip it over on the back first and have a look at the terminals we've got obviously neutral
permanent live our CPC connection is switched live and load out we'll come on to the features of
those as we go through and look at the different versions but let's just look at the selectable
one first and the first thing you can select is the color temperature so we've got three thousand
four thousand or six thousand five hundred degrees kelvin combined with the colour temperature you
can either have 10 or 15 watts which obviously is higher or lower light output i'd just like to say
that i no longer measure my light output in the watt wow you've moved on there is a step change
now obviously we measure light output in lumens not watts because obviously that gives you a clue
to its efficiency and this range from Robust goes from just over 900 lumens all the way to just
under 1300 lumens and you also put it on the box if you can't remember and good thing i like about
Robus is it's attention to detail because actually you expect the light output to be different
at different colour temperatures and that's what you see slightly lower when it's a warm white
slightly more light when it's a cooler white one and that's reflected in here there's all the data
for that on the website i will put a link in the description where you can have a deep dive
into that and pull down the files you might need if you're going to do a lighting design
but then when it comes to lighting design Gary what's the next thing that people often think
about in this kind of application absolutely it's the emergency light fitting and can we
have one of those so let's see how easy it is to convert this fixture to an emergency version
anybody who's possibly done this in the past we used to see the spiders web of wires this is
really literally plug and socket connections all around so the first thing we're going to do is fit
our control gear to the back plate and that's easy because we've got these locating tabs here so it's
a case of just snapping them in no screws required it is just lock them into place with those tabs
yeah you're quite right i've looked at those wiring diagrams before and it's a deep breath
moment it looks like we're just going to re-route a few wires now yeah it is so now a case of
unplugging the wire that went from our terminal block to the conventional driver across to our
emergency LED driving we've got neutral live and a switched live connection there as well so
that plugs in there and then the output from the emergency driver now plugs into the conventional
driver now you'll notice and all the wires there there's useful labels as well yeah we do like a
label and the whole thing is fully labeled as well what sort of wattage am i going to get out
of the emergency element of this fitting uh so this is a one watt output and there's some other
benefits of that will come onto as well so this is the output from our emergency driver so now it's a
case of just plugging that into the output of the conventional driver and that's where that's going
to power the LEDs on the circuit board at the front and there's one of those lovely labels to
tell you exactly where it goes and there's your LED indicator and that's even labeled as well
to where to poke that through the tray yeah so that's the other the green light and i quite like
these ones it's not too bright sometimes people go really bright on these led indicators this isn't
the battery pack itself is lithium-ion phosphate so it's a newer battery technology which means
it's very compact and also more environmentally friendly compared to those older NiCad's
and that just plugs into the terminal block at the end of the emergency driver here
and the good thing about that it doesn't power up the LEDs until it's at its first power cycle
so it's not going to discharge the battery earlier in the construction process before you've got the
power on yeah so if you were to flip that over we'd see that none of the LEDs are illuminated
which is great we're not draining that battery before actually the first time we've powered it
up there's our LED indicator let's check it works yeah so then we've powered up you can
see the green indicator there so then cut the power and then we can see our light LEDs have
come on at a lower power level but they're all illuminated in emergency mode we could clearly
see there when we went into emergency mode in other words we lost the power that all the LEDs
illuminated and thinking back to my time on site and testing emergency light fittings it was often
just a small cluster of those LEDs that come on under that circumstance and that's another
well thought out feature this product because of that you have the same light distribution as you
would when the fixtures in normal mains operation clearly not the same amount of light but you don't
need the same amount of light and that's great for when you're doing your emergency lighting design
however Gary what is the most efficient type of light okay it's one that isn't on which leads us
nicely into next thing which is occupancy sensors so we found another use for our Knipex Super
Knips just to remove these small nibs on the metal core circuit board of the light fitting so we can
introduce our microwave occupancy sensor so microwave sensors need to see the outside
world but they do work behind the diffuser which is great because it means you don't damage the
IP65 rating of the fixture itself okay and here comes that sensor again no screwdriver need it's
just going to clip into the tray and of course the tray is fully labeled of where it's got to go
yeah which is great no screws yeah again just this is this is simple simple conversion stuff it's
just yeah it's almost a bit like Lego really so just let's flip it over and just see how that's uh
poking through the circuit board now uh we're going to come back to this we've got the piano
switches there to adjust the various settings for the the unit itself and you'll also see there's a
little light level sensor as well to measure ambient light so again it could be disabled
when there's daylight coming into the building and as we said before fully labeled all of the
leads and it's just a case now of re-routing the leads in order that we can make the connections a
little plug-and-play so you can just push this one into position yeah so this is the output from the
microwave sensor so yes clearly labeled and that plugs into the input of the conventional LED
driver you can't get them the wrong way around they are handed connectors there's only one way
to do that and then here's our uh input from the circuit board terminals into the actual incoming
wiring and is that it completed that's it so we've done our conversion so let's just flip it over
again look at some of the options we can set so the detection area we can increase or decrease the
uh obviously how far the microwave sensor is measuring in terms of room size we'll just
put that to minimum so we can do a little test and then we're just going to come on for five seconds
so also we can do a little walk test and then you can enable or disable the daylight sensor as well
so let's uh let's power up and check how that works come on at full brightness and then now
we're just going to wait for five seconds for that to to go off as if someone's left the area
so someone's left the area now when anyone enters the area i've obviously come straight back on
again i know what you're thinking you've seen the emergency you've seen the occupancy sensor
can you bring both parties together in the one fitting let's have a look okay so now let's add
the emergency option to our fixture we've just converted to sensor operation so again we're just
going to bring back in our emergency power supply so again just clips into place as we saw earlier
and then we just need to make some more changes to the wiring so again let's unplug the wires that
come from the terminal block and then plug them back into the emergency driver so you're going to
go through the emergency driver first so that's our live and switched live and now the output
from that driver now goes to the input of the microwave sensor so again just plug that back in
and that's our main end taken care of so now again just bring the bring the battery pack back in
plug in our output from the emergency driver into the output of the conventional LED driver slot
the batteries in and put the connect that battery pack back up and i think you've demonstrated what
a simple and fast processor is as well obviously pop your led in and then we're probably ready to
energize aren't we yeah so let's just give it a little test but let's just quickly revisit
those terminals first we've got our switch live and permanent live and then we've got the L out
or the live out terminal so that can be used to trigger other fixtures from this microwave sensor
so more than one light in the area the first one gets triggered and they'll all come on and we'll
see that now yeah so they're both on so it's activity in the area yes again let's just wait
for that to time out so we'll see that the both fixtures switch off at this point so about five
seconds we'd set it to so we'll see them both go out and when there's activity in the area
they both come back on so if we lose the power now we'll only see one of the fittings actually
re-energize so the power's gone off and it's just the emergency one now that's illuminated
that was a simple simple process well i mean that is great how you can pack all of those options in
to that one unit and the connections are simple and i stress it again if you've ever had to look
at how a normal conversion has done with that wiring loom and really really complicated wiring
diagrams that is probably the easiest one i've ever seen and i don't say that lightly however
you may not want all of that technology you might just want a simple energy retrofit and
again Robust have got you covered there because in this Golf range you can get this gear tray
which replaces the 2D lamps is where we started the story so this one comes out and this tray
pretty much fits almost anything yeah it fits a lot of things out there and there's also a lot of
you know i think legacy even LED ones that we've done a few years ago from possibly people who are
ahead of the curve where again you can use this to re-retrofit and obviously ones even from different
manufacturers however you can also get individual parts within the Golf range that have all of
the features in there without having to do the conversion so you may have a big project where you
need lots of exactly the fittings are the same and you don't need that level of flexibility and this
range is immense you've even got the option so this emergency fitting here is selectable in color
temperature also has another great feature this is a slightly slimmer version which may help in some
possibly narrow corridors or where you don't want to be dropping down too far from the ceiling
and yeah this it's the range is immense but incredibly easy incredibly flexible and of course
you'd be thinking they haven't mentioned it yet and it's normally Gaz that mentioned it it's IP65
and it's IK9 as well for fittings across the range yeah and that's what you'd expect in this
kind of applications where we see this but again we go back to where we start from a great way to
save energy and you know that's an opportunity for contractors in the current climate we're in
yeah so yeah dive in take a look at this range or possibly share some of the
things you like about the possibly we missed or some of the features that you're experiencing
on site that you'd like to see in the ridge has the one been missed out i can't see there would
be but if there has been one missed out drop some comments below we'd love to know what you think
about this range and obviously the challenges that you face in these kind of applications