Automatic Court Lighting, Driven by Your Bookings

Ask a club about their floodlights and you tend to get two stories from the same season. In one, the groundskeeper arrives at seven in the morning and Court 3 is still blazing away, because the pair who finished at half nine never found the switch, or found it and didn't feel responsible for it. In the other, a member turns up on an October evening for a court they paid for, and it's pitch dark, because whoever has the key went home at six.

Most clubs end up picking which of the two they'd rather have. Leave the lights on and you're paying to illuminate an empty court all night; leave them off and you're letting down someone who paid. What makes it frustrating is that this was never a scheduling problem. The club knows exactly who booked which court and until when. It just had no way of telling the lights.

Now it does.

The lights follow the bookings

Pair your smart relays with Isopenat and tell us which courts each one lights. From then on your booking calendar drives them. The lights come on a few minutes before a booking starts, so nobody walks onto a dark court while they're still lacing up, and go off a few minutes after it ends. Both numbers are yours to set, per court.

Back-to-back bookings are treated as one continuous stretch, so the six o'clock pair handing over to the seven o'clock pair never get a blink of darkness in between. Trainings and club events count exactly like customer bookings, because a session on the calendar needs light as much as a paid hour does.

It knows when it's actually dark

The obvious rule, "switch on after five", is wrong in June and wrong again in December, and someone has to remember to change it twice a year. So instead of a clock, the lighting can follow the sun: set it to run only when it's dark, offset by as many minutes around sunset and sunrise as you like. Sunset is worked out from your venue's own coordinates, so it shifts with the seasons on its own and you never touch the setting again.

A morning booking in midsummer simply doesn't switch anything on. The same booking in November does. And if you'd rather have plain fixed hours, or you're switching something that tracks opening times rather than daylight, that option is still there.

One board for the whole club

Automation you can't see isn't reassuring, so there's a Controls page: one card per circuit, showing what it's doing right now, which courts it covers, who's on them until when, and what's booked next. It refreshes itself every half minute, which makes it the page worth leaving open on the tablet at reception.

Each card has a three-position ON / AUTO / OFF selector, deliberately the same shape as the Hand-Off-Auto switch already sitting on the contactor in your distribution board. AUTO is the resting position, where bookings are in charge. Move it to ON or OFF and it stays there until someone moves it back, exactly like a physical switch: a rained-off evening, a maintenance night, a photographer who needs the court lit at midnight. Closing up early is two buttons at the top of the page: everything off, or everything back to AUTO.

If one circuit lights two courts, it's one card naming both of them, rather than two cards that quietly control each other. Switch it off while there are people on the other court and it asks you first. Your read-only staff can see the board without being able to change anything, which is usually the right split for reception.

What happens when something goes wrong

Handing your lighting to software is only comfortable if the failures are boring, so the awkward cases were the part we spent the longest on.

• Every "on" carries its own expiry. The relay is told to switch itself off after a set time unless it hears from us again, so even if our end goes down completely, the lights still go out on their own. That expiry sits an hour past the end of the booking, because a court going black in the middle of a rally is a ruined evening and a refund, while an extra hour of light nobody needed is small change.
• There's a cap on continuous hours, so a booking entered wrong can't leave a circuit running for a week.
• A circuit we can't reach is shown as unreachable, never as "off". A guess presented as a fact is the one thing a board like this must not do.
• A person always outranks the automation. If you've moved a circuit to ON by hand, the safety cap doesn't overrule you. It's there to catch our mistakes, not to argue with your decisions.

Who benefits

• A tennis club with floodlit courts stops paying for light after the last match and stops getting calls from members standing in the dark.
• A padel club running until eleven at night lets the courts light and darken themselves, so the last booking of the evening doesn't need a staff member on site to close up.
• A sports hall uses the same mechanism for something other than lighting: heating or ventilation that has no business running for an empty hall.
• A club with one circuit over two courts gets a control that says so, instead of finding out the hard way in the middle of someone's match.

What you need

A smart relay or switch on the circuit you want driven, and someone qualified to wire it in. If the building already has smart switches, there's a good chance we can pair them as they are. If you're not sure whether yours will work, just ask. The list of what we support keeps growing, and adding another one is usually quick.