House lights - upgrading

[NTABID]

Thank you all for your very helpful replies. I've priced up the suggested LED solutions, but they're well out of range. The idea of Source 4 Pars with long life bulbs seems the avenue to follow, so we'll work up a proposal along those lines. And, re skill-sets, will be meeting our 'in-house' professional electrician on Tuesday.

 

Thanks again.

[Andrew Edwards]

Don't discount the LED route completely.

Depending upon how you are funded, you may have access to grants, free loans and other green subsidies.

 

I have been doing some (conservative) calculations for our venue and a GDS system will recover the capital through various savings in less than 5 years. Along with the huge energy saving, you also have no lamps to buy and save time on replacing them regularly. Due to the location of our lights it takes an entire day to change only a handful of lamps as we have to erect and dismantle a scaff tower at each location above the seating.

Also as the GDS is a mesh network and can have individual addresses for each fixture you don't necessarily need them all on all the time leading to futher savings.

 

At the very least you should be able to get a (free or otherwise) loan for the equipment to be paid back via the energy savings alone.

[musht]

Along with the huge energy saving, you also have no lamps to buy and save time on replacing them regularly. Due to the location of our lights it takes an entire day to change only a handful of lamps as we have to erect and dismantle a scaff tower at each location above the seating.

 

Energy savings can be substantial for lights that are on a substantial amount of the time, venue houselights probably don`t operate 12+ hours 7/365, its`s usual to provide a secondary system using fluro or discharge to operate as `cleaners` lights.

 

LED lighting is advancing fast, in 5 years time, can guarantee thet there will be something brighter ,that uses less power ,with a better quality of light at half the cost.

 

Would be very wary of taking out loans without looking at numbers very closely.

 

If you do decide to spend now, make sure you get something that can dim to ZERO smoothly, its something that very few LED units can achieve but its absolutely essential for houselights. Don`t be like a venue was recently looking at, put refit in the tens of thousands for changing LED controls that won`t make it to 0% smoothly, in reality they are stuck with an energy efficient houselight system that annoys them every time its used.

 

Lamp change access, again relative to actual hours put on the lamps , with soft starting and rarely being run at 100% halogen should have a long and happy life with group relamping being an annual or less event.