Job Description

We The Curious

LED Lighting Upgrade

Enlightened was first approached by the technical team at Bristols We the Curious attraction in early 2018 to put forward a proposal and efficiency study with costings for replacement of their current theatrical and architectural traditional lamp fixtures with the latest in performance orientated LED fixtures. The proposal was designed to highlight the efficiency savings of the latest in LED fixtures and the savings afforded by the reduction in their energy footprint.

To maximise the venue's budget and provide a more straightforward installation process, which would cause the minimum of disturbance to the venue's function we recommended utilising the venues existing rigging infrastructure. To ensure the venue could still utilise it’s existing lamp inventory we replaced the older in situ dimmers with grid switches and sockets which allow more versatile movable dimmers to be used. The grid switches also provide for future versatility and addition to lighting infrastructure. For the movable dimmers, we specified two of the brilliant and versatile Zero88 Alpha Pack. Provision of the Alpha Packs affords greater flexibility over use and control of lighting design allowing for future integration of additional fixtures when desired.

We specified and installed eight ETC ColorSource PAR in the Deep Blue variant. The ETC ColorSource LED fixtures specified are much admired within the lighting industry. ColorSource Profiles and Par fixtures outperform other four-colour LED’s of their type, thanks to their precise combination of red, green, blue and lime emitters. ETC applied its extensive colour-mixing knowledge to the fixtures to ensure that they can achieve brighter, richer and more believable colours than other budget LEDs.

To provide lighting control we installed a customisable Pharos touch panel. The customisable Pharos touch panel controller has the advantage of being both intuitively simple to use affording straightforward, effortless control over a multitude of programmed lighting states and effects, allowing the user to easily trigger scenes and visuals and manually override these as desired. This allows IT to monitor and maintain the system with educational staff being able to trigger and override scenes where necessary.

Commenting on the new installation and works John Polatch, Live Science Content Manager at We the Curious said, "We just wanted to say thank you for the new lighting installation.  We couldn’t have been happier with the work you’ve done.

We really appreciated the time you guys took to understand our needs, your patience and listening skills to discuss technicalities with us at length, and flexibility to respond to our choices. We valued the balance you took between giving professional advice about how to get the best outcomes from the system, and compromise for our unique situation, budget and whims! Thank you also for taking the time to explain technical details for both how to use the kit we have, and how we might make changes or additions in the future. We were also struck by how tidy your site working was – and not a scrap of tape or a cable tie left behind!

It’s really appreciated that the installation was handed over fully functional by the deadline, and I suspect you may have worked overtime to get this to happen. For the first live show at 10.30 the following day, the presenter said that the lighting sequence worked perfectly, the audience said that the lighting pointed at them wasn’t distracting, it was less hot and there was less light on the projector screen to wash out the picture.

We genuinely feel that you’ve given us something which meets all of our objectives for the upgrade, and leaves us feeling confident to use it and to be able to understand the future possibilities".

LED INSTALLATION SAVINGS 

On average, an LED fixture uses over 80% less energy than a traditional fixture fulfilling the same function. This impressive energy saving is however much increased by the RGBW LED fixtures versatility. Their adaptability and flexibility of function mean that they can be utilised more conveniently.

For example, whereas two par cans may previously have been required, (the first, set up to light a space with clean white working light and the other incorporating a gel to provide effect lighting), both these functions can now be effortlessly fulfilled by a single RGBW LED par that can not only smoothly transition between the two phases but can be retasked within a moment to provide alternative options, further reducing power consumption by removing a fixture that is now superfluous.

We calculated that the annual saving to ‘We the curious’ could be as much as £15,000 over five years; this represents both the saving in energy consumption and re-lamp maintenance of current fixtures. This saving equates to a significantly reduced carbon footprint with a reduction of over 5 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide per annum. We estimate these savings would allow the installation to pay for itself in under 7 years. 

These savings only begin to illustrate the benefits of utilising LED fixtures and does not begin to quantify the increased creative productivity of technical staff, not to mention longevity reliability, low maintenance savings and the future high residual value of the units themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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