Altman rejuvenates Westfield High School
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With a busy annual event schedule which keeps their 868-seat auditorium in regular use, the antiquated house lighting design was often struggling to provide the illumination desired. Working with long-time partner Associated Controls + Design, the school decided it was time to renovate the aging house system for a brighter and more visually engaging environment using Altman Lighting Chalice LED downlights installed by Huston Electric.
“Westfield High School has been a long-time client of ours and we even sold them the first lighting control system when they originally built the auditorium,” began Mike Brubaker, Associated Controls + Design. “We’ve been involved at the building for about 20 years now, but this transformation from halogen downlights to Chalice LED luminaires is probably the change with the biggest visual impact.”
As with many high schools across the nation, the auditorium is not only the main performance venue for the arts program, it is also serves as the primary gathering space for numerous events and meetings. Needing a house system that could keep pace with the schedule at hand, the antiquated system currently in place was falling behind with a heavy power consumption.
“They’ve been working towards converting the entire lighting system to LED for a while now, so the house lighting upgrade had been in the plans,” continued Brubaker. “While the biggest push really came from the maintenance issues, an additional benefit would also be the energy-savings as they were also able to cut power consumption from the old 250W fixtures to the brighter Chalice 70W luminaires.”
Taking into consideration the controls portion of the auditorium renovation, the technology of the Chalice luminaires was easily able to integrate into the new, more state-of-the-art controls interface. Without the need to change the dimming package behind the system, there was an immediate visual impact from the rejuvenated lighting design.
“An additional part of the project was to change-out the old wall controls, so now they can control the house fixtures either through the new wall stations or their theatrical DMX control console,” added Brubaker. “With the advantages of a mains dimming solution, we didn’t have to change any of the existing dimming system, and we were still able to provide them with an updated, modern front-end control system.”
