Umudike Journal of Engineering and Technology

Lighting is an essential element in an academic environment which affects visibility and performance of visual tasks. This study assessed the illuminance quality and light distribution of the lighting systems used in thirteen classrooms in five different buildings in a Nigerian university for visual safety in handling the predisposed visual task in the classrooms under the IES standard recommendations for classroom work plane. The illuminance of the classrooms carried out on the students’ works planes was through the instrumentation of a digital luxmeter (model HS1010). In each of the classrooms assessed, nine grid measurement points were considered, across the rows and down the columns. The measurements were conducted during the day between 8:00 – 10:00 am and at night between 8:00 – 10:00 pm. Analysis of classroom illuminance data obtained gave average ranges of 60 – 1837, 71 – 1979 and 0 – 82 lux for daylight, daylight + artificial light, and nighttime artificial lighting respectively. The classroom work plane illuminance standard showed 53.8, 54.7 and 0 percent compliance level for daylight, daylight + artificial light, and nighttime artificial lighting respectively. The three categories of lighting system assessed were all above the standard illuminance uniformity ratio of 0.3 for the perception to remain acceptable but for 7/12 (53.8%) of the classrooms on artificial light. Multiple independent-sample t-tests used for comparisons of illuminance obtained for the three categories of measurement on SPSS version 16.0 software at a confidence level of p