Elation Fuze Pendants light Lighthouse Church
- Details
Wanting to address their sanctuary lighting before Easter, the church initiated a house lighting overhaul as the initial step in a larger refurbishment project that will entail audio, video and lighting. Icon Media, specialists in integrated systems for houses of worship and an Elation dealer, was contacted by church leadership and strategic planning consultant’s GrowMentum to handle the project.
“We have a staff that understands the specific nuances of this market, how it operates and is structured,” states Icon Media president Brian Gore. “The HoW market requires a special approach, specific skills and sensitivities that you need to keep in mind and our experience at Icon has made us one of the front-runners. A lot of churches don't have a full-time technical staff so we help design around that and find a system that’s right for them.”
The company conducted a site survey at Lighthouse Church early in 2021 and consequently came up with a design proposal to modernize and upgrade the facility. The approximate 600-capacity worship space, a converted light industrial building, had a previous house lighting system that consisted of an array of 1000W scoop lights.
Charlie Pike, project manager at Icon Media, says the old system was both poor quality and inefficient and that LED was the obvious solution. “Their house lighting was not only costly to run and maintain, the entire room was suffering because of it,” he says. “We modelled the room in design software, created photometric reports and eventually auditioned several house lighting fixtures. We found that the Fuze Pendant not only offered some of the best colours, especially in the white spectrum, but they were a perfect fit for the space while meeting the goals they wanted to achieve.”
Hung from ceiling joists across the room are 21 Fuze Pendants equipped with 50-degree lenses. Pike says they did a before and after comparison to show church leadership what they could expect and the results were telling. “Illuminance went from a previous average of about 9ft candles to an average of about 50ft candles across the room,” he says. “And power consumption dropped from about 16,000 watts to under 5000 watts and that’s if the Pendants are at full brightness, which they are not. They run them at about 50% for the walk in look for example, so the savings in power is even greater.”
Although the drop in power consumption was something the church was happy about, the quality of the light and even coverage across the room is what really excited them. “When we first turned the system on they were blown away,” Pike shares. “One of the challenges when you commission a new house lighting system is getting the perfect coverage to fit the room and a lot of that credit goes to the Fuze Pendant fixture itself for being very high quality and well-engineered. Combined with the custom design, drafting, previz, etc. on our part, not to mention having the right resources in place, the first phase of the project was a great success.”
The house lighting upgrade at Lighthouse Church was installed by Icon in time for the Easter celebration and, according to Pike, was a smooth process. “The Fuze fixtures were perfect out of the box and needed no special attention. We just plugged them in and addressed them. No bugs and no tuning or colour calibration needed.” Icon worked with Elation manufacturers’ rep firm Freed Sales on the project. Plans for phase 2, also to be handled by Icon, will see an upgrade of the church’s broadcast capabilities, as well as new stage and key lighting.
