This application is the U.S. National Phase application under 35 U.S.C. § 371 of International Application No. PCT/IB2012/055359, filed on Oct. 5, 2012, which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/543,861, filed on Oct. 6, 2011. These applications are hereby incorporated by reference herein.
This invention relates to electrical power control for lighting systems and has particular but not exclusive application to Power over the Ethernet (PoE) lighting systems.
Some electrical lighting units such as LED luminaires can be driven at a lower voltage than a conventional mains AC supply, making low voltage.power distribution feasable in a lighting network.
PoE has been developed for supplying low voltage power from a source such as a PoE switch, to a powered device such as a wi-fi access point or video camera, through the same Ethernet cable that carries signals to and from the device. This greatly simplifies installation of networked devices because only one cable is needed for both power and communication. Power is typically supplied from a PoE switch in common mode over the differential pairs of wires found in Ethernet cables. The IEEE 802.3at-2009 PoE standard permits up to 25.5 W of power to be supplied to the network powered devices. Also, non-standardized PoE schemes have been proposed and implemented hitherto.