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126 TECHNOLOGY / BENCH TEST


David Morgan takes a look at LUMsearch, a new stand-alone lighting design program from DIAL. LUMsearch is a progression from the German company’s DIALux program and has been created to assist designers in their search for suitable luminaires.


STARTING THE SEARCH


DIAL the German lighting software spe- cialists are best known for their DIALux lighting design programme, which was first launched in 1994 and allows lighting design- ers and specifiers to accurately simulate the performance and lit effect of luminaires in their schemes. Currently DIALux is free to download and is in use by around 400,000 users in 180 countries. Taking the luminaire specification and se- lection process to the next stage, DIAL has now launched LUMsearch as a stand-alone website database for luminaire search. It is understood that the aim of the devel- opment was to answer these three ques- tions that a lighting designer is likely to ask when working on a project:


- Where am I going to use the product? - How will I mount it? - What lighting effect do I wish to achieve? The LUMsearch website allows the user to search for luminaires by key word, general type or application area and to then refine the details to include a variety of other details including light source, IP rating, dis- tribution luminaire shape, paint finish etc. At the moment the application areas seem to be rather limited. For example there is no retail display lighting category. The search results are presented as a list of products with company logo, a small thumbnail image of the product and a simple polar diagram. Clicking the images produces a product information sheet that


can be saved, exported to DIALux for use in simulations or sent to the supplier for more information. There is no price or lead time informa- tion included with the technical data, but the data sheet can be emailed directly to wholesalers for pricing. The site is free to manufacturers at the moment to display luminaire information and images. However additional features such as links to the manufacturer’s website are charged separately. A counter on the home page shows the number of luminaires currently available for searching. Today this showed at over 215,000 products from 136 manufacturers. The interface has been designed to work on


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