Altman Lighting Brings House Lights to the Worship Experience at Cascade Hills Church

	Cascade Hills Church. Photo: Morris

Located in Columbus, Georgia, Cascade Hills Church is a congregation filled with parishioners from all walks of life who wish to come together for a spirit-filled worship experience. Like many other churches worldwide, the technical elements behind that worship experience, including the architectural house lights, are becoming an important component to the overall sanctuary design. With an aging house lighting system of their own, Cascade Hills Church recently worked with the integration division of their longtime partner Morris, and renovated their 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," began 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."

For your energy-efficient house lighting needs, the Chalice LED Series is a line of low-energy and low-heat down lights 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 continued, "The center atrium of the sanctuary is about 35' wide with a trim height at the apex of about 60', 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' 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 their design challenges, it was the form factor of the Altman Lighting 100W recessed house light that first caught their attention and lead them to the complete Chalice family.

"For the under-balcony fixture, we wanted a 100W recessed fixture but we only had about 10" of clearance," explained Burggraff. "Since the Altman Lighting 100W Chalice recessed can offers an 8" 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' 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," concluded 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."