PROJECTS
The grandMA3 light at FOH Dartz 360
Olive’s LED upgrade Olive Baptist Church has retrofitted its entire sanctuary with a new LED lighting rig. James Cooke speaks with director of communications, Bobby Taylor IT’S WELL-DOCUMENTED HOW LED lighting fixtures can save houses of worship money in the long run by being more energy-efficient and requiring less maintenance. That doesn’t mean that a lighting upgrade of any kind won’t be expensive if done properly. For Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida, when it decided to take the plunge and implement an LED upgrade, the church went all in by undergoing a refurbishment of its complete lighting setup – including both the house and stage lights. ‘With the LED technologies now available, we knew that the cost savings over a long period of time would save us a lot of money; we just needed to understand the upfront costs,’ recalls Bobby Taylor, director of communications at Olive Baptist Church. ‘So, we did some calculations and felt that with the age of our equipment, which was almost 27 years old, it was time to go ahead and make the switch. Especially as
we were beginning to experience a lot of problems with our dimmer racks. As parts would fail, the room began to get darker in sections. The money it was taking to maintain the tungsten light fixtures and the wattage loads we were using determined it was best
30 WORSHIP AVL July–August 2020
to upgrade the entire system to LED technology.’ Replacing the old rig with another conventional system was out of the question as LED solutions offer too many benefits. The other decision for Taylor and the Olive Baptist team to
make was whether to replace just the failing dimmers, the entire dimming rack or whether to spend out and upgrade all lighting in the church. ‘We should consider the option that’s going to save you money in the long run,’ says Taylor. ‘If you’re switching over to LED, there’s going to be an upfront cost anyway, but you will ultimately save money by doing all the work in upgrading the whole setup in one go when it comes to the installation. And we’ll see that money paid back. In our case, we had 522 house fixtures. By switching to LED, we removed three 600A breakers. We had 1,800A feeding our incandescent house lighting fixtures. We had roughly another 100 stage lighting fixtures that we just pulled out and we now have 360 house lights and about 140 theatrical lights. The result is that instead of 1,800A, we are now running on less than 400A for lighting. It doesn’t take you too long to figure out that’s going to save some money.’
