Lighting schedule: what goes on it, and how to make one
What a lighting schedule is, the columns it needs (lumens, colour temperature, dimming, IP rating, driver), which values come from the supplier page and which from the plan, and how to make one without an afternoon of retyping.
A lighting schedule is a list of every light fitting in a project, one row per luminaire, with the product data and the electrical facts that the electrician, the client and the supplier each need. It is the FF&E schedule for one category, with more columns, and it is the schedule most often made by hand, because the values are spread across three places.
The FF&E schedule answers "which product". The lighting schedule also has to answer "what does it plug into, how bright is it, what colour is the light, and can it be dimmed". Those answers live on the supplier's page, in the manufacturer's data sheet, and in the electrical drawings, and the schedule is where they meet.
What a lighting schedule is for
The electrician wires from it: circuit, switching, dimming, the driver a fitting needs. The client approves from it: the picture, the finish, the price. The supplier ships against it: the product code and the variant. The site team hangs from it: the location and the mounting height.
Four readers, one document. The columns matter more than the layout, and the layout gets printed twice: a table for the electrician, cards for the client.
Lighting schedule columns
A lighting schedule template starts with the product columns of the FF&E schedule: code, name, supplier, brand, product code, dimensions, material, finish, price, source, image. What is an FF&E schedule, and what has to be in it goes through those. Lighting adds these.
| Column | Why it is there |
|---|---|
| Location | Room and position, tied to the lighting plan. L-01 on the schedule is L-01 on the drawing. |
| Mounting | Pendant, recessed, surface, wall, track, floor, and the height where it is not obvious: a wall light at 1,700, a pendant at 2,100 to the underside. Drives the electrician's first-fix. |
| Cut-out | For recessed fittings: the hole diameter and the depth behind the ceiling. The value that decides whether the fitting goes in at all, and the one most often missing from the sheet the electrician gets. |
| Light source | Integrated LED, or a lamp type the fitting takes (E27, GU10, G9). Integrated means the fitting is replaced, not the bulb. |
| Output | Lumens, not watts. Watts say what it costs to run; lumens say how bright it is. |
| Colour temperature | In kelvin. 2700 K is warm, 3000 K is neutral-warm, 4000 K reads cool. One project, one temperature per room type, or the rooms will fight. |
| Colour rendering | CRI, when it matters: kitchens, dressing rooms, anywhere colour is judged. 90 and above is the usual ask. |
| Dimming | Yes or no, and by what: phase, DALI, 1-10 V, a smart driver. A dimmable fitting on the wrong dimmer flickers. |
| Control | Which switch or zone it belongs to, matching the electrical drawing. One fitting on two schedules with two zone names is the site's problem by the time anyone notices. |
| IP rating | For bathrooms and outside. The zone on the drawing sets the minimum. |
| Driver | Included, remote, or to be supplied. A remote driver needs somewhere to live. |
| Quantity | Per row, so the totals are right. |
Not every project needs every column. A residential schedule can drop CRI and driver; a restaurant cannot. Commercial work adds emergency fittings, marked as such, and the connected load per circuit; that half of the schedule is the electrical engineer's and the codes have to match yours.
The values that are never on the supplier page
Half of these columns cannot be extracted from anything, because they are decisions, not facts. Location, mounting height, control, quantity, dimming and the IP zone come from the drawings and from you. The supplier page will tell you the fitting is dimmable; it will not tell you whether it is on a dimmer in this room.
That is worth knowing before you start, because it splits the work in two. Product facts are copied. Project decisions are made. A schedule is fast when the copying is done for you and slow when the two are mixed on the same afternoon.
Why a lighting schedule takes an afternoon by hand
A lighting schedule for one apartment, about forty fittings, took the better part of an afternoon by hand. Not the deciding; the deciding was done on the plan. The afternoon was: open the supplier page, find the lumens (on the second tab), find the colour temperature (in the variant name), find the dimensions (in a PDF), find the price (for the variant, not the one shown), type them in, save the image, next fitting. Then lay out the sheet, export, notice the wrong finish on L-14, fix, export again.
Forty fittings, eleven product values each, four hundred and forty values moved by hand. Every one of them was already on a page somewhere.
A lighting schedule that does not go stale
Fittings get discontinued more often than sofas. A lamp chosen in the concept phase is gone by the time the order goes in, and the replacement has a different lumen figure, a different driver, sometimes a different cut-out. The schedule that was true in March is wrong in September, and nobody knows which rows.
The fix is the same as for the FF&E schedule: keep the rows in one place, keep the source link on every row, mark which values came from the page and which you typed, and generate the printed sheets from the rows instead of maintaining them separately. When a fitting is swapped, one row changes and every print follows.
That is what Intspec does for the copied half: paste the supplier links, get the product values into the rows with a mark on each one, and print the table for the electrician and the cards for the client from the same rows. The decisions stay yours, in their own columns. You still check every value. You stop typing them.
How to make a lighting schedule
Start with the plan. Number the fittings on the lighting plan first, then build the schedule in that order. The code column is the spine of the whole thing; a schedule made before the plan is numbered gets renumbered twice. Then collect the supplier links against the codes, fill the product columns from the pages, and add the project columns from the drawing. Print the electrician's table and read it once as the electrician: if a row does not say what it is wired to and whether it dims, it is not finished.