RHS Wisley Christmas Glow : Smart Energy GB

Smart Energy GB and the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) entered into a partnership that lit up the winter sky at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey as part of the garden’s annual ‘Christmas Glow’ event. This partnership saw us install over 3,000 lights spanning 200 acres connected to smart meters within the gardens as part of the traditional ‘Glow’ event helping to reach people with information about how smart meters work and the benefits that they can bring to households. The project was one of my largest to date, working with Tarren (Rik Haines) & Jigantics (The lovely Jig) we build two outdoor living rooms which acted as hubs for controlling the lights. Dining room tables were modified to include push buttons and other sensors which reacted in real-time across miles of networked lighting dressed up as flowers. The entire installation was controlled by 4 Raspberry Pi's; 2 of which were monitoring the realtime energy consumption & a further two for handling the interactivity and communications across the DMX lighting networks. The project attracted over 150,000 visitors across the Christmas/New Year period & had to withstand the sheer destructive nature of both the severe winter weather & hordes of over-excited children.