House Lighting; par cans or hanging pendant lighting

[trevatankard]

We are in the final days of deciding about house lighting for our new building. The Contractor's advice from Lighting engineers and our Media Consultant differ. Building seats around 650 - 700 and we will have theatrical stage lighting. They have 64 par cans with 500 watt bulbs on the plan. Media consultant thinks that is too much. The Pendant lighting is too expensive. What is the best solution?

[Esoteric]

I have never seen pendant lighting large enough to cover a room that size.

That being said, I think that is overkill. For example a recent install in a 350-450 seat room the architect recommended 32 500w cans. I cut that number in half. They still only run the house lights at 70% as a full setting.

Another install, in a 500-700 seat room, we have 44 cans with 500w lamps. Plenty of light, in fact that room they are never run over 60%.

I have been in worship centers/theaters where "full" house lights was 40% because of the amounts of light. Architects love to throw up tons of lights to make the place look like an office building.

Mike

[waynehoskins]

The ceiling height will affect the number of units you need to cover .. for example, in our place which seats only about 250-300, I'd need something on the order of 32 fixtures with wide lamps just to get decent coverage .. because the ceiling is at ten feet. (grumble grumble stupid ceiling)

But yeah, I think you're going to want PARs for that. Our place currently has eight ceiling fans with halogen light kits .. GC (who's also a church member) insisted that it'd be enough. The coverage itself is decent, few black holes .. but intensity is crap because they're all of 75? 100? watt mini-can halogen lamps with a pretend reflector behind them.

Given the choice, I'd rather be able to get the house lights brighter than I want and to normally run the handle down in the 7 or 8 range. Man, that'd be so nice. An improvement for probably another year, with the economy down the tubes like it is now.

[D.R.HADDOCK]

Originally Posted by trevatankard

We are in the final days of deciding about house lighting for our new building. The Contractor's advice from Lighting engineers and our Media Consultant differ. Building seats around 650 - 700 and we will have theatrical stage lighting. They have 64 par cans with 500 watt bulbs on the plan. Media consultant thinks that is too much. The Pendant lighting is too expensive. What is the best solution?

What is too much? 500w is not too much for stage or house lights,
Does this designer have experience in the real world?
You will need minimum 300w for smaller rooms, or 500w for larger rooms.
And dont forget that phase out of incandesant lamps could be a problem.
Our room was using 500w incandesant lamps with e38 base in high bay fittings,
but these lamps are hard to get now, so we now use 500w theatre style lamps
with gy9.5 bases, these are much easier to obtain, and work great.
They work so well we rarely run them at full, but on some occassions they
are required on full.
And because they dont run on full very often, they last a long time.