The Show-Me State’s Pleasant Valley Church invested in 120 Chroma-Q Inspire color-mixing LED house lights, providing an immersive worship environment for its congregation while dramatically reducing the venue’s running costs.
By Church Designer Staff • June 21, 2016 3:48 pm EDT
Pleasant Valley Baptist Church (PVBC) is on the north side of the Kansas City metropolitan area, and has a weekly attendance of around 4,000 people. The church has existed since the 1940s at various locations, but was purpose-built at its current location in 1997.
PVBC has three unique styles of worship service happening every weekend in the same room — the main worship center — meaning that flexibility and reliability of its lighting system is very important.
Kansas City-based worship lighting installations specialists, Stark Raving Solutions, provided an LED house light “shoot out” in collaboration with North American lighting distributor, A.C. Lighting Inc., with a view to replacing PVBC’s old 500w incandescent house can lights, installed in 1997.
In application
“When demo’ing and comparing house lights with DMX control from multiple manufacturers, the Chroma-Q Inspire fixtures totally hit the mark for price and functionality,” says Stark Raving Solutions’ Marcus Hammond, who was also technical director at PVBC from 2004-2014.
“Some of the more traditional services have only white house light, while the more progressive or contemporary services use single colors — or an entire spectrum of colors — across the whole room to provide the congregation with an immersive worship experience,” Hammond reports. Providing a range of beautiful whites, soft pastels and bold saturates all from a single fixture, the Chroma-Q Inspire’s fully homogenized lens offers a choice of stunning mixed colors, with no unsightly color separation shadows, he adds.
The Inspire fixtures also met the criteria for an energy-efficient solution that would provide reduced maintenance and running costs. As Hammond explains: “Following an LED retrofit of all types of lighting across the church’s entire 200,000-square-foot campus — of which the Inspire house lighting in the main worship center was the largest wattage differential from old to new fixtures in the entire project (the house light system’s energy consumption has been reduced by [more than] 75%) — the church has seen a monthly reduction in energy consumption of more than $8,000 per month. The running cost savings of having LED lighting for the whole campus are therefore huge, equating to a potential annual saving of up to $100,000.
In addition to the LED lighting’s long-term energy savings, the church’s local energy utility company offered a significant rebate program, at $1/watt differential per fixture. The Inspire is a 120w fixture, replacing a 500w incandescent fixture, so the rebate was around $380/fixture multiplied by (120) fixtures — equating to a rebate of more than $45,000 for the Inspire lighting alone. By incorporating industry standard DMX-512 control, the Chroma-Q Inspire range is able to integrate seamlessly with an existing stage lighting infrastructure and can be controlled by any DMX-supported lighting console to provide seamless lighting from stage to audience.
“The option for color has been beneficial for special events, such as the 4th of July Patriotic Service, and special music-only nights that are an intentionally immersive worship experience for the congregation,” Hammond reports. “The fact that the Inspire is also convection-cooled was beneficial to the church. They wanted to minimize the need for future repairs or regular maintenance, such as cleaning filters. It also means the fixtures are totally silent during services. We’ve been highly recommending the Inspire since the product was made available. Stark Raving Solutions knows the quality and reliability associated with the Chroma-Q brand, and the Inspire is a great example of this.”
The Chroma-Q range of premium performance solutions is designed and built to exacting standards in North America, and has been adopted by many leading designers and specifiers for some of today’s most demanding and prestigious lighting applications, the company reports. As a result, the brand has received awards from several industry associations.
Other leading house of worship venues that have invested in the Chroma-Q Inspire house light fixture include the Maranatha Assembly of God Church in Minnesota, Celebration Church in Florida, Valley Creek Church in Texas, and the historic Pieterskerk building — formerly a church — in the Dutch city of Leiden.