Before any of us were talking about PoE regularly, HE Williams was going all in on PoE as a platform. At SDA, we’ve seen a rise in the interest and implementation of PoE as a method for delivering power and control. But for many, there’s still a learning curve when it comes to PoE.

Last year, HE Williams further invested in the PoE method of lighting with their acquisition of Platformatics. Platformatics is ready to run as a full service PoE lighting provider. Their work with Williams allows for turnkey solutions, but no matter what lighting fixtures you are specifying, Platformatics can help you design and implement a PoE system.

What is PoE Lighting?

Power over Ethernet (PoE) has been around for decades. Your office phone, security cameras and many other low voltage devices have drawn power over ethernet cables for years. As the power allowances for PoE switches and cables have increased along with LED efficacy, the possibility for PoE as a lighting platform has come to the fore.

The diagram above is a basic graphical representation of a PoE Lighting infrastructure. Comprised of a server (computer) for creating rules and commands, an area controller for storing and delivering those commands, ethernet switches for delivering power and signal, nodes to translate that power and signal and finally the light fixtures and wall stations themselves.

HE Williams has developed a complete family of LED fixtures.

Why PoE?

The primary benefit of moving to a PoE platform is integration. PoE offers the ability to easy integrate lighting with the rest of your building systems. When everything is speaking over a common language, it becomes a matter of software integration.

The graphic above is a simple energy management dashboard. But through advanced APIs the backbone software of the Platformatics lighting system can integrate into countless other building management and sensor systems.

You might be thinking “Yes, but so can traditional systems.” The reason that doesn’t happen is simple. Those systems don’t all speak a common language and require a gatekeeper Building Management System to act as a central hub. This means that commissioning is limited to what is possible from the BMS system, it’s difficult and expensive to change and costly to upgrade.

An Example - The PoE Powered Classroom

When we start to think about how this could work with other lighting technologies, like BIOS or Tunable White light, shade control, HVAC, AV and a host of other software-enabled systems and you start to see why PoE makes sense from a system perspective.