Beaulieu Abbey Church Internal LED Lighting Upgrade
c. 220 + Online Audiences
Budget
£37,000
Location
Beaulieu, Hampshire, UK
Key Elements
Setting The Scene
Beaulieu Abbey Church, notably one of the jewels in the crown of Lord Motague’s Beaulieu Estate. Playing host to many different activities throughout the calendar; as a church operating in it’s own right with beautiful weddings and celebratory services being held here. Also notably there are regular public concerts from the ‘Music at Beaulieu’ organisation, inviting semi-professional and professional outfits from places such as King’s College Cambridge, the Yehudi Menuin School and Glyndebourne to perform in this beautiful and engaging space. At other times the Church is open daily to visitors from the adjacent Motor Museum and therefore is open for much of the daytime to visitors.
From Proposal to Execution
It was deemed that the lighting in the church (40x 250 watts) wasn’t offering the best value in terms of running costs, and also replacement lamps were becoming more obsolete. Coupled with the fact that the primary light fittings themselves along the length of the roof of the church were some 10m from floor level presented several challenges and so it Pro Live were invited to offer a solution.
The finished article needed to be of the highest order, and the brief was that the installation needed to be conducted with a view to a phased approach to replacing all the lighting with LED. However, with budgets in mind this had to be conducted over a period of time, so parts of the existing installation needed to be retained to allow the entire system to keep running at whatever stage the project was; effectively as a live system.
Another consideration was that, for approval by the fabric committee it was deemed that the replacement LED luminaires needed to be as faithful as possible in appearance and performance as their existing power-hungry predecessors.
Pro Live offered a proposal which ticked all the boxes, and with their experience working in listed buildings and commercial settings we were able to implement the solution with ease. We traced the manufacturer of the original light fittings back to Italy to seek a direct LED replacement – of course there wasn’t one – so we set about deconstructing all the original light fittings and carefully reconstructing them with LED light engines in to meet the brief. Then, we introduced a lighting control protocol called DALI into the solution, and identified control panels which visually matched the existing. Through some clever programming we integrated the new DALI LED fixtures with the older triac-dimmable system and presented a beautiful, efficient and easy to use solution to all.
The end result was a widely revered success and we were delighted with the result too! Pro Live have since been invited to work on other projects, not only in this Church building, but also other houses of worship and spaces which require the same level of care and attention as we always offer.