Accurate planning is essential to designing and installing superior outdoor lighting and audio systems. Integrator Boca Tech & Automation in Boca Raton, Fla., has taken this process—and their business—to new heights by leveraging LiDAR scanning technology.
The dealer primarily serves affluent Palm Beach County, with some clients in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Fisher Island. For these luxury residences, Boca Tech relies on LiDAR to determine proper placement of fixtures and speakers for potential customers’ outdoor projects.
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology that employs a laser scanner, two cameras on each side, GPS, and an Inertial Navigation System (INS) to transmit pulses of light to the ground surface, according to the USGS. The pulses are reflected or scattered back from a satellite and the travel time is used to calculate the distance between the scanner and the ground.
It’s a five-figure investment resource that differentiates Boca Tech from its competition—and really the rest of the integration industry—and enables the company to create precise documentation, renderings, and design of outdoor tech projects. The meticulous details make the award-winning dealer’s proposals truly impressive.
“We have this for every site that we do, and it was the game changer because I can lay things out perfectly. I can see everything,” enthuses Boca Tech Founder & CEO Jeff Galea. “We can do precise measurements, which is something we had a problem with before.”
Using the LiDAR scanner, Boca Tech’s installers can walk a site and calculate measurements from the ground, but importantly, in addition they can switch to “point clouds” and receive aerial views from the satellite.
These show every detail of a property, so Boca Tech can truly dial in wire runs and lighting and speaker placements. “I can now measure wire distances, see where and what the trees are, plan zones… from this, we create photorealistic renders,” Galea says.
The system is compatible with IES (Illumination Engineering Society) files Boca Tech uses from Coastal Source, which generate specs that inform the design proposal.
“It tells us everything we need to know about that fixture. Beam spread, color temperature, wattage—and so when we input that, we’re getting the light output of that exact fixture. So, we can say to clients, ‘That’s what it’s going to look like at 6 p.m. at your address on this day,” Galea explains.
That ability to give homeowners a virtually real-world perspective of how their home and property will be transformed by the outdoor lighting and audio systems is a compelling benefit of LiDAR.
It produces what Boca Tech calls a “digital twin” by rendering a reproduction of the property via 3D virtual tour, notes Gomes, who can typically scan a property up to 5 acres inside and out and capture all the datapoints in an hour or less (more if deploying drones).
Galea adds that “digital twin” also sounds less techy to clients and easier to say than LiDAR.
“They get to view their property from all angles, from what your neighbors are going to see, what you see from the street, what do you see out your windows. It could be a structure like a fountain that you want to see lit up,” Galea enthuses. “We want to make sure clients know that their yard will look great no matter where they’re seeing it from.”
It enables Boca Tech to point out areas that clients might not think need addressing, but professionally designed lighting and audio systems reveal the reasons why they do. Homeowners might not be considering the different ways they use rooms, and the drastic impact the vibrant views outside will evoke on the owners daily as well as visitors when they host social gatherings.
At the first meeting with potential clients, Boca Tech presents a 2D zone plan and a fixture schedule as part of its package, plus graphical renderings, a heat map, and other details based on Gomes’ walkthrough. They also educate the customers on why Coastal Source’s engineering, build quality, and testing differentiate their solutions.
LiDAR-generated site mapping is done for outdoor audio as well, figuring out precisely where the Bollards, Razors, Line Sources, and other speakers plus amplifiers will be located for optimal performance and coverage. All the meticulous prep work and planning facilitated by the LiDAR scanning helps Boca Tech save on labor required at the time of installation.
“We’re definitely a design-forward firm, so we will spend hours in design to save the install time, and the project goes boom, boom, boom,” Galea states.
The integrator has mastered its method of dangling maintenance contracts, too. They smartly bake into project contracts a free white-glove service visit, fostering the opportunity for a long-term relationship.
Boca Tech will perform tech inspections and landscape growth management—and usually show clients how much less wear and tear the Coastal products have versus previous systems they had or compared with other brands.
These touchpoints plant the idea of why ongoing services (twice annually) make sense for the homeowner, to consider how the products fit into changing landscapes, any issues that need addressing, speaker placement that might tweaking, etc. They also give Boca Tech a chance for upselling the latest products and expanding the systems.
“Some clients don’t want to invest in everything at once, but showing the cables and connectors lets them know how easy it is to scale,” Gomes says.
Meanwhile, the dealer’s new Control4 Certified showroom incorporates a room dedicated for a Coastal Source demo with plans to add an outdoor lighting integration showcase. The Coastal fixtures include Lutron bulbs and Ketra lighting is also highlighted.
Boca Tech shows multiple aspects of outdoor living and how smart home platforms like Control4 not only interact with the lighting and audio system commands but can also control other features such as turning on/off fountains or hot tubs.
The results of this innovative project design process speak for themselves, and outdoor lighting and audio sales have become a significant part of Boca Tech’s business. The close ratio is as good as it gets.
“We’ve gotten 100 percent sales from our presentations,” Galea says. “We’re batting a thousand.”
