Game on – W-DALI proves that when it comes to sports lighting, wireless wins

When German sports association, SV Eintracht Ihlow, set out to install a new lighting system for its arena, they faced a common challenge: how to achieve intelligent lighting control without running expensive new cabling and digging up the field in the process. Partnering with Sportslight, Bergische Elektrotechnik turned to LumenRadio’s W-DALI – a wireless solution that delivered the long-range reliability, simple integration and cost savings the project needed.

Marvin Reichenbach is founder and CEO of Bergische Elektrotechnik, a German company focusing on industrial automation and control technology. They were contacted by long-term client, Sportslight, to tackle the lighting project for the sports field in northern Germany.

“The ground’s floodlights needed to be controlled intelligently,” explains Marvin, “And wireless technology was really the best option. Doing this with cables would have meant tearing up the pitch – a labor-intensive and also extremely costly process.”

“Once it was obvious we had to do this wirelessly, the challenge became finding a solution to give us the range and reliability we needed – which is why we chose LumenRadio’s W-DALI.”

W-DALI works like a wireless cable, replacing the DALI control cable with pure wireless communication. And since it uses LumenRadio’s patented wireless technology, it achieves a level of performance unmatched by other wireless standards.

“All the other wireless control options we have come across do not have anywhere near the range of W-DALI, so there wasn’t really an alternative.”

Marvin Reichenbach, CEO, Bergische Elektrotechnik

14 new sets of floodlights were installed – 12 around the football pitch and two for the running track. The floodlights were spaced approximately 50m apart and at a height of 16m.

“We chose to install the W-DALI nodes into each set of floodlights in our workshop to save time later on site,” explains Marvin. “The electrical installation then only took one working day to complete. Doing it this way meant we didn’t need to work with the control side on the sports field because all the spotlights had been conveniently fitted with W-DALI at our premises. All that remained was to wire the 230V power supply.”

For this installation, the W-DALI receiver nodes were used to create a single wireless mesh network giving the sports field the smarter lighting control it needed. The transmitter – a W-DALI DIN rail device – was fitted in the existing control cabinet located on a wall next to the playing field.

“From a technical perspective, W-DALI was easy to deploy and the support from LumenRadio was 10 out of 10! I think W-DALI is a great solution for the entire retrofit sector.”

Marvin Reichenbach, CEO, Bergische Elektrotechnik

As more sports facilities and public spaces look to upgrade their lighting systems for efficiency and intelligent control, W-DALI provides a powerful alternative to traditional wired systems and proves that going wireless doesn’t mean compromising on reliability.