Commissioned is a moment; working is a condition
A lighting control system is never more accurate than on the day it’s commissioned. From then on, it drifts. Someone overrides a schedule for a holiday event and it stays overridden. A tenant fit-out moves a wall, and a sensor now watches a filing cabinet. A gateway loses power in a storm and comes back with an old configuration. None of this is dramatic, so nobody notices until the energy bill rises or occupants start taping over sensors.
The real question is how much ongoing care your system needs, and which tier matches it. The comparison above sets out the scope; here is how we think about each tier.
Watch
Remote monitoring on Lytbit Ledger, next-business-day response and a quarterly report. Watch suits stable systems in buildings with capable facility staff who want a second set of eyes and a clear escalation path. Most issues are resolved remotely, or with your staff on the phone.
Tune
Everything in Watch, plus seasonal re-tuning visits and an 8-business-hour response. The visits matter more than people expect. Daylight settings that were right in June are wrong in December, a second shift added in spring needs new schedules, and a reconfigured floor needs new zones. Tune is our usual recommendation for buildings with daylight zones, multiple shifts or frequent layout changes.
Steward
Everything in Tune, plus 4-hour remote response for critical faults, annual re-commissioning and firmware management. Steward is for buildings where a lighting failure stops work or creates risk, and for systems under financing or performance agreements that require reporting.
Which plan fits which building
| Building | Plan we’d usually suggest | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Single office with in-house facility staff | Watch | Stable use; staff can act on alerts |
| School or campus | Tune | Seasonal calendar, summer changes, daylight-heavy classrooms |
| Manufacturing plant on shifts | Tune | Schedules follow production, and production changes |
| Distribution center or cold storage | Steward | Dark aisles stop work; very high fixture counts |
| Clinic or outpatient facility | Steward | Patient-facing spaces with little tolerance for faults |
| Multi-site retail or branch portfolio | Steward | One view across sites and consistent firmware |
These are starting points. A small building with a critical function can need Steward, and a large, simple warehouse with good staff may do well on Watch.
What firmware management actually involves
Firmware is where support plans usually turn vague, so here is what Steward covers. We keep a register of firmware versions for every controller and gateway, and we track manufacturer security notices. When an update is relevant, we install it on matching hardware in the Lytbit Lab first and check that sequences and integrations still behave. Then we schedule the rollout with your IT team, take a configuration backup beforehand and have a rollback plan ready. We never apply an update simply because it’s available.
Annual re-commissioning, briefly
Once a year under Steward, we rerun the functional test scripts from the original commissioning on a representative sample of spaces, fix what has drifted and issue an updated configuration report. If the system never had test scripts, the first year builds them.
What a plan doesn’t cover
We’d rather say this now than in a dispute later. Plans don’t include replacement hardware outside warranty, new zones or sequences added during a renovation, or expansion to new floors; we quote those separately, from the same documentation. Monitoring also doesn’t replace the periodic testing and inspection of emergency lighting that your fire code and local officials require.
Support for systems we didn’t install
Most buildings we support were designed and installed by someone else, sometimes by a manufacturer that has since left the market. Every plan starts with an onboarding health check and a configuration backup. If the platform itself is nearing end of life, our legacy migration service plans what comes next, and monitoring continues while it happens.
