Visible-spectrum lighting in a processing facility exists for exactly one consumer: people. Cameras don't need it — ours run infrared and structured light, which deliver better contrast for classification than fluorescent tubes ever did. When the last human role moved off the floor at Facility One, the lights became pure overhead. So we turned them off. This post covers what that actually involved, and what we learned from commissioning our first facility that has never had its lights on.
What lighting was costing us
Facility One's legacy lighting load was 1,900 high-bay fixtures running around the clock, plus the HVAC burden of removing the heat they emitted. Combined with conditioning air to occupant-comfort ranges, people-support systems accounted for a meaningful slice of energy per unit — energy that produced nothing. Decommissioning lighting and retuning climate setpoints to process-optimal ranges drove most of our 28% per-unit energy improvement.
What cameras want instead
Our perception mesh runs two modalities. Infrared provides the primary imaging channel: consistent contrast independent of surface color, no glare from wet surfaces, and no sensitivity to the flicker that plagues visible-light imaging under aging fluorescents — we spent an embarrassing amount of v1.8-era engineering compensating for 60Hz harmonics beating against rolling shutters. Structured light provides depth: each array projects a calibrated pattern and reads geometry from its deformation, which is how we hold orientation accuracy at line speed. Neither cares whether the room is lit. Both perform measurably better when it isn't, because ambient visible light was noise, not signal.
Commissioning in the dark
Dark commissioning changed our operational playbook. Emitter arrays self-calibrate nightly against fixed fiducials surveyed into the building steel; drift beyond tolerance flags the array for the next maintenance window. The mesh is designed for graceful degradation — any camera's field of view is covered by at least two neighbors, so individual sensor failure narrows confidence margins rather than blinding a station. Maintenance crews work scheduled windows under portable lighting, the only time any part of a facility is lit. The rest of the time, the interior of a Jones Foods facility is something no one has ever actually seen: the sensors don't record in the visible spectrum, and there is nothing else inside to look.
The numbers
| Metric | Legacy (lit) | Dark operation |
|---|---|---|
| Lighting energy / unit | baseline | 0 |
| HVAC energy / unit | baseline | −31% |
| Perception false-reject rate | 0.9% | 0.4% |
| Fixture maintenance events / yr | ~340 | 0 |
The facility of the future isn't bright white. It's black, it's quiet, and it sees better than ever.
We're hiring across perception and facilities engineering — see open roles.