By Gerard Bowtell-Harris, Technical Lighting Specialist, Raylinc Lighting
Underground reticulation design, or URD, is the design of underground power for estates with no overhead lines. The street and pathway lighting runs off that underground supply, so it needs to be planned with the rest of the services from the start.
Gerard Bowtell-Harris has a simple way to picture it. “If you were to go to your grandparents that live in a retirement village, that whole village has been designed with underground reticulation.”
The same goes for gated communities and any estate where you don’t see power lines overhead, apart from the big high voltage ones. URD can serve small local streets, community centres and shopping precincts. It can also carry the NBN and optic fibre.
The lighting for roads, footpaths and the connecting paths between blocks of houses runs off that underground supply. That replaces the high mast poles you’d see elsewhere.
A commercial car park has one main job: getting people in and out safely, including in and out of their vehicles. “If the lights are on in the car park, people feel safe,” Gerard says.
Roads and pathways in a masterplanned community serve many uses and many users. Vehicle safety still matters, but so does amenity. Lighting can encourage people out onto the street. “If it looks like there’s lighting there, people are more likely to use it,” Gerard says.
That brings in questions a car park rarely raises:
If lighting isn’t planned at the start, the power and services to run it aren’t allowed for. That gets expensive fast.
Gerard explains it in layers. Electrical services sit deep in the ground, with water closer to the surface. “If you work from the deepest thing first, that would be your electricity.”
Once water and sewer mains are in, adding lighting late means trenching underneath services that are already there.
Underground reticulation design: the design of underground power networks for estates, retirement villages and other developments without overhead lines.
Yes. In URD estates, the lighting for roads, footpaths and connecting paths runs off the underground supply.
At the start, alongside the other services. Adding it after water and sewer mains are in means trenching under existing services.
Car parks focus on getting people safely to and from their vehicles. Estate roads and paths serve many users, so glare, footpath light and spill into homes all need managing.
Gerard Bowtell-Harris is a technical lighting specialist at Raylinc Lighting and a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society. He designs lighting for roads, pathways, car parks and facades with consulting engineers.
Contact the Raylinc team to bring lighting into your development at the planning stage.