Sure energy savings matter, but when you create experiences for over 25,000 people weekly like Eagle Brook Church does you cannot sacrifice performance for savings.
Eagle Brook Church is one church with multiple locations in the Midwest; empowered by God to Reach Others for Christ. Stepping into a church can sometimes feel overwhelming. Eagle Brook puts you at ease – no matter your story or relationship to church. Grab a drink from the cafe, then take in an incredible message with powerful music during the 60-minute service.
One of Eagle Brook’s ten campuses was built in Woodbury back in 2014. As most lighting people know, that is the year that LED lighting really started becoming relevant. Many buildings constructed around that time had to choose between legacy lighting technologies or the first generation of LED products. Given what Eagle Brook does with large-scale performances, they rightfully chose to stay with legacy lighting that they could trust to perform the way they needed it to.
Fast forward 7 years and LED lighting has come a long way, yet still is difficult to match the performance of some legacy lighting. In many situations the advantages of energy and maintenance savings outweigh the need for performance, but as mentioned at the beginning not for Eagle Brook Church. Until now…
As we have retrofitted sanctuary lights in hundreds of churches around the country, standard LED retrofit solutions for these lights at times would work well. Yet other times flicker would begin to occur especially once they were dimmed down to the 10% or lower range. This generally being due to such a different load after retrofitting to LED, going from 250W or 500W halogen to 30W LED. Over the course of 50-100 house lights, this change in load was not something older dimming systems were equipped to handle and thus this is why many run into flicker problems. Such is the difficulty of operating on dimming systems that were developed years before LED became a thing.
However Premier Lighting was able to develop a custom LED lighting retrofit that was implemented at Eagle Brook church which matched the dimming performance of the halogen lighting they were using on their existing dimming system. This is key because upgrading dimming systems is a six-figure+ cost in terms of material/labor/construction. All told, this retrofit upon completion reduced Eagle Brook’s energy consumption by over 80%, improved light levels by over 20% and increased the life expectancy tenfold. Most importantly for Eagle Brook, there was no sacrifice made to the performance of the lights.
Whether you have a church, theater or school auditorium, if you are interested in premium LED retrofit solutions for your high ceiling lights, contact Premier Lighting today. We have been a lighting distributor for over 30 years in the St. Paul, Minnesota area and look forward to many more years of providing customers with the optimal and practical lighting solution for their facility.