Lighting audits, maintenance and relamping

A lighting audit is not a walk-through with a phone torch. It is an inventory of what the building actually has, how it is controlled, what is already illegal, and what will fail next winter. I still get “audits” that are a luminaire schedule copied from a 2011 as-built and a note that says “convert to LED”. That document is how owners buy the wrong carton.

This is the field method I use before a retrofit, a maintenance tender, or an argument about why Level 7 looks yellow. It sits in energy and controls because maintenance hours and dirty fittings move the meter as much as a new driver.

Why buildings drift

Commercial lighting stock in Australia is a sediment. T8 in the car park, T5 in the 2008 tenancy, a 2016 LED panel that already flickers, a 2022 “feature” pendant with no spare, and emergency battens from three generations. Facilities teams buy whatever Bunnings or the wholesaler has when a room goes dark. Colour temperature wanders. Diffusers yellow. Someone tapes a photocell. The Section J model from the last fit-out no longer describes the floor.

An audit makes that drift visible. It also stops a relamping contractor from “matching what’s there” when what’s there is already a mess.

How to walk a building

Take the electrical schedules if they exist, but do not believe them. Take a cosine-corrected lux meter, a ladder or EWP plan, keys, and permission to enter plant and toilets. Group the work by access, not by architectural zone: scissor-lift floors are a different job from a 2.4 m plaster ceiling.

For each fitting family record:

• Location and approximate count, by room and by circuit if you can see the board.
• Mounting, IP rating, and whether the fitting is open, enclosed, or stuffed with insulation.
• Light source and control gear as identified, not as hoped. A “LED” sticker on a troffer that still has a T5 ballast is a sticker.
• Control: switch, sensor, 1–10 V, DALI address, BMS, or “unknown night lighting”.
• Emergency or exit function, and whether the pack looks original.
• Condition: failed lamps, brown drivers, cracked diffusers, insect graves, water.
• Access method and any lock-out that will dominate the maintenance price.
• Ceiling type and any asbestos or hygiene constraint.

Photograph the interior of one fitting per family. The photograph is what you will argue from when a supplier says their tube “just drops in”.

Measure a sample of rooms at night, on the working plane, with furniture in place. Daytime-only lux readings are postcards. Pair the numbers with AS/NZS 1680 so you know whether the room is under-lit, over-lit, or merely uneven. If glare is the complaint, the audit needs sitting-height notes, not only an average. Elise’s glare essay is the companion walk.

Grouping is a spare-parts decision

The useful output of an audit is not 4,200 fittings. It is twelve families you can write a contract around. I group by optical type, source, control gear, emergency status and access. I do not group by paint colour.

Good families look like this:

• 1,200 mm LED batten, non-emergency, surface, back-of-house, switched.
• Same batten, emergency maintained, same rooms.
• 600 × 600 low-glare panel, DALI, open plan.
• IP65 high-bay, 1–10 V, warehouse aisles.
• Exit signs, one manufacturer, one legend style.

Bad families look like “downlights” or “office lights”. Those words hide five beam angles and three colour temperatures. You cannot buy spares for a mood.

Once the families exist, decide a future state. Keep, convert, or replace. Conversion is a retrofit with a specification. Keep-and-maintain needs a cleaning cycle and a spare. Replace-on-fail needs a current product that still meets the lighting specification and the energy report.

Relamping, module replacement and the death of the tube

Fluorescent relamping was a rhythm: burn hours, group replace, recycle mercury. LED fittings mostly do not work that way. The source is a board. The driver is a separate failure. Colour can shift while the lumens still pass a lazy glance.

Write the failure mode you are buying:

• Replaceable module and driver, with a part number the owner can still purchase in five years.
• Sealed luminaire, whole-fitting replacement, with a spare holding on site.
• Retrofit kit that turns an old body into a documented new fitting.

I will not maintain a unique imported pendant with no Australian spare. That is a decoration with a fuse. For commodity battens, hold a percentage on site — enough for a board failure on a Monday, not a second building. For emergency fittings, hold packs and complete luminaires. A dark exit sign is not a backorder item.

Group replacement still has a place: a floor of mixed-age LED panels that have started to show three greens and two whites. Replacing them one at a time guarantees a patchwork. Budget a campaign, not a storeroom of odds.

Cleaning is part of the lumen budget

Every calculation you signed used a maintenance factor. That factor assumed someone would wipe the diffuser and the room optics would not turn into a grease filter. In a Melbourne office with decent filtration, a two-year clean may be honest. In a rendering plant, a bakery or a Darwin warehouse, the factor is a wish unless the cleaning contract names luminaires.

Cleaning is also how you find failed emergency packs, cracked IP seals and the bird nest on the high-bay. Put it on a cycle with the 2293 tests, not as an afterthought for the Christmas shutdown. Instruct cleaners not to rotate battens open and leave them unlatched, and not to spray solvent into a microprismatic panel. I have paid for both.

Record a few lux readings before and after a clean on a sample room. That is the only way to keep the maintenance factor honest when the next designer copies your model.

Spares, obsolescence and procurement

Australian supply chains still surprise people who specified a European exclusive. Confirm that the spare is a stocked item at a wholesaler the contractor already uses. Confirm voltage, dimming protocol and emergency variant. Confirm the colour (see CCT, CRI and TM-30) so the spare does not introduce a 5000 K stripe through a 4000 K floor.

Write a substitution rule for maintenance buys. Otherwise the night electrician will install a bright, glary, cool lamp because it was on the van. That lamp becomes the new standard by entropy.

For DALI systems, the spare is not only hardware. Keep the project file, the address list and a person who can add a replacement driver to the group. A perfect physical spare that sits at address 0 is a dark patch.

What the report should let someone do on Monday

A competent audit report lets an owner choose among three funded options: maintain, convert, replace. It prices access. It flags asbestos and after-hours work. It lists emergency failures as compliance, not as energy. It names the meters you would need if NABERS is the next conversation. It does not invent a ninety per cent saving.

I attach a family schedule, a sample lux table, photographs, and a recommended two-year maintenance programme: clean, test, replace failed, review controls. I also attach the questions the owner must answer: hours of use, tariff, whether residual fluorescent stays, who holds keys at 2 a.m. Priya’s TCO method needs those answers. Without them the audit is only a catalogue.

If you have a maintenance clause that looked tidy in the spec and died on a scissor lift, send it via write for us. The editorial standards are why we would rather publish a failed clause than a supplier’s perfect one.