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Located in Columbus, Georgia, Cascade Hills Church is a congregation filled with attendees from all walks of life. Like many other churches worldwide, the technical elements behind the worship experience, including the architectural house lights, are becoming an important component to the overall sanctuary design. With an aging house lighting system, Cascade Hills Church recently worked with their longtime partner Morris, a full-service production and integration company with expertise in customized audio-visual design and activation. Morris renovated the church's house lighting design with Chalice LED Pendant and Recessed LED downlights from Altman Lighting.
“This was actually our third technology installation at Cascade Hills Church where we have previously retrofitted their theatrical lighting, video and audio systems,” begins Dustin Burggraff, Morris integration division project manager. “While working with them on the other projects, we noticed the sanctuary was very dark to the point where the congregation would have difficulty in reading from their Bibles, so we started having discussions on how updating the house lights would really help the space take on a new life. Once we started looking at the fixtures on the market, our local manufacturers rep pointed us to the Chalice family of LED house lights from Altman Lighting, which were the right choice for the lighting design renovation.”
The Chalice LED Series is a line of low-energy and low-heat downlights that provide high-output and high-color rendering white light. With an on-board power supply, the Chalice LED Series is either DMX Controlled or Mains-Dimmable, and is also available in 50W, 70W, 100W or 150W options with Pendant, Wall, Yoke mount or Recessed configurations.
Burggraff continues, “The center atrium of the sanctuary is about 35-feet wide with a trim height at the apex of about 60 feet, but with the previous house lights many of the areas were measuring as low as one footcandle. Additionally, due to the high trim height, the church was spending about $8,000 a week anytime they needed to rent an atrium lift to change bulbs. In the redesign, we needed to get everything down to an even trim height of about 30 feet for an even coverage, but then flanking the center atrium on each side there was also a lower drop ceiling, plus we had an under-balcony location too. We actually needed three fixtures but they had to have a similar color temperature, look, control type and dimming curve.”
As the team at Morris continued their search for the specific products, which could solve the design challenges, it was the form factor of the Altman Lighting 100-watt recessed house light that first caught their attention and led them to the complete Chalice family.
“For the under-balcony fixture, we wanted a 100-watt recessed fixture but we only had about 10 inches of clearance,” explains Burggraff. “Since the Altman Lighting 100W Chalice recessed can offers an 8-inch clearance, this got us looking at the entire Chalice family and Altman was also able to provide the 150W recessed and 150W pendant fixture as well. They did a great job working with us to provide custom drop lengths for the pendant fixtures with hard-wired tails so that we could hit the 30-foot trim height and have DMX control throughout the entire system, which was something we could not find with any other manufacturer.”
With the product solution now identified, Morris installed a total of 86 Altman Lighting Chalice LED house lights into the Cascade Hills Church sanctuary. The complete project included (22) 150W pendants for the center atrium, (34) 150W recessed fixtures for the areas flanking the center atrium, and lastly (30) 100W recessed fixtures for the under-balcony with all the lights controllable by either the lighting console or a wall-mounted architectural control station.
“Looking at the before-and-after of Cascade Hills, the transformation is pretty remarkable,” concludes Burggraff. “The look and output of the Altman Lighting Chalice fixtures is some of the best that we have seen from an architectural standpoint. Our goal at Morris is to always help our clients achieve the worship environment desired, and the Chalice house lights were instrumental to this project by providing a lot of data control flexibility with a great output and dimming curve.”
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