TMC Case Study

Tropical Marine Centres - Manchester, London & Bristol

We were approached by Tropical Marine Centre (TMC) to design and build a system to control the lighting in the viewing area of the new site in Manchester. The system had to have the following:

Be able to increase & decrease the light level at a speed which wouldn't cause distress to the fish.

Have a controller which staff on-site could alter time settings easily.

Have an override to keep lights on longer than time settings without altering any software.

To meet TMCs requirements we installed light fittings which all had digital ballast installed in them instead of the usual choke type fittings. The advantage to using digital ones is if a lamp fails the light will not function rather than flicker, which would cause distress to the fish.

The lights were split into banks which were switched independently by a PLC, this combined with some of the lights having dimmable ballasts allowed for very precise control of the lights with a long lighting up period.

Visit TMC at http://www.tmc-ltd.co.uk/