Phil Howard, Sales & Business Development Manager for Anolis UK covers October’s blog sharing his insights on some of the challenges he has encountered during the Covid-19 pandemic. He discusses new ways of working and describes measures that have been implemented due to restrictions on a recent project which recently completed in the North East of England.
Lighting in a Covid World - How Anolis are gearing up to the challenge by Phil Howard
The construction industry has faced many challenges during the ongoing Covid-19 Pandemic. Whilst many sites have temporary closed some are continuing with imposed restrictions to reduce the risk of spreading infections. Overall the construction industry is having to look at both the short and long term implications of Covid, addressing each project on an individual basis.
The Tyne Grange Care Home, owned by Exemplar Health Care, is due to open its doors this month and because of the key nature of the business, site work has been allowed to proceed throughout the lockdown and ongoing restrictions. The project entails the refurbishment and internal alterations of the existing care facility. This will support 22 adults living with complex mental and physical health conditions, including neuro-disability and acquired brain injuries.
As part of the refurbishment, Anolis UK supplied colour changing LED products from their Ambiane RGBW recessed Downlight range Specified by Sine Consulting, these were installed in the specialist assisted bathrooms. As well as providing bright natural white light, they can illuminate the bathrooms with subtle or saturated coloured light. Blue is often used to help the residents remain calm and relaxed whilst using the facilities. The Ambiane range are DALI compatible which enabled easy integration with the building’s lighting control system. The addition of an IP54 lens gave full protection against splash water.
As a supplier to the construction industry, Anolis Lighting have had to adapt our working procedures and systems. As one of the company’s Project Managers, I have been predominantly working from home for the last 7 months and have (like thousands of others..) used Skype, Zoom and Teams for meetings, as well as the occasional socially distanced face to face meetings. For my part, digital meetings are working fairly well but I miss the face to face interaction with both colleagues and customers and we are still overcoming the challenges of demonstrating working luminaires in a digital world. Both our UK office and production facility in the Czech Republic has remained fully operational throughout this period. The layout of the factory has been re-organised to ensure a minimum distance of 1 metre is maintained between workers at all times.
AEL Electrical, appointed electrical contractor, have installed the wiring, re-wiring, and new lighting at Tyne Grange. Their installation team had to adapt and change many of their working methods to ensure they followed governments social distancing guidelines and stringent hygiene protocols. Some of these methods included.
- Rearranging and re-organising the electrical team so that the task could be done by one person, or by maintaining 2 metre social distancing measures.
- For tasks where face to face working was essential it was necessary to keep the contact time down to a maximum of 15 minutes.
- Minimising the number of workers involved in wiring and installation of the lighting and where possible keeping small groups of workers together.
- Ensuring re-usable PPE was thoroughly cleaned after use and never shared. Ensuring none re-usable PPE was disposed of in the appropriate area.
- Increased ventilation in enclosed spaces and ensuring all windows remained open where possible.
- Regularly cleaning common touchpoints, doors, buttons, handles, vehicle cabs, tools, equipment etc.
- Using stairs in preference to lifts or hoists and one-way systems for entrances and more congested areas.
At Anolis we will continue to work with all members of the design team on future projects and adopt a proactive approach to this new ‘normal’ in the industry. It is incredibly important that we can continue to offer a reliable supply chain service for lighting and reliability of service in all other areas.
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