Cisco Canadian headquarters located in Toronto’s newest LEED Platinum WaterPark Place III, takes up 4 floors of tenant space covering over 83,000 ft². The new Cisco office feature a client facing innovation centre that is one-of-its-kind in North America, with video conferencing rooms, cafes, collaboration space, a critical computer room as well as other multi-purpose rooms.

The HIDI Group provided Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing, Lighting, and LEED Fundamental Commissioning to achieve LEED Gold status while bringing the client’s vison of “Internet of Things” (IoT) a reality. The project boasts the first large scale commercial implementation of Power over Ethernet (PoE) luminaries in North America.

Effectively implementing this new technology, we reduced the Lighting Power Density to 52.6% below ASHRAE 90.1 2007 allowances. Lighting is tailored to users’ needs via occupancy-based controls, daylight sensing, and pre-set scenes with dimming.

The Project has been the recipient of multiple awards covering areas from innovation, energy efficiency to lighting.

Challenges

One of the challenges faced during this project came in convincing the landlord Oxford Properties to disregard its brand new lighting control systems and luminaries and allow for a new product that at the time had not been available in the market.

Being the first large scale PoE lighting installation in Canada comes with its own short comings due to the lack of prior design guidelines and product limitations such as the lack of PoE emergency lighting solutions for a high rise application. Other issues included building requirements to match colour temperature of the base building fluorescent luminaries with the new PoE LED type required our team to be on site to help with installation of several trial runs.