Great lighting in any building increases the looks of your building and decreases the running costs so there is no reason why anyone should suffer with bad lighting in their building.
Lighting on the exterior of church’s has made them stand out amongst other scenery around, this can make a church more noticeable so appealing more to anyone walking by the church.
Lighting used on church’s can be a lot more eco-friendly than you may think. LED lights are extremely eco-friendly, they reduce running costs and also lower your carbon footprint as LED lights are more efficient.
The Church Interior Lighting
For the interior of the church, LED lights can be used to brighten darker areas that otherwise would have been left to be unnoticed. With LED lights the whole church can be lit without requiring a fortune.
A church that is bright can be seen as cleaner and more modern so it’s getting more expected for modern church’s to have the correct lighting to cater for the needs of visitors to the church.
LED lights are environmentally friendly and as the environment is an increasing concern of most people in society turning green in a church is looked up upon. With reduced bills and LED lights for inside, outside and around the church there really is no reason why you shouldn’t be investing is great lighting.
LED are as effective as other non-eco-friendly bulbs with the brightness and at least 100,000 hours of constant use before you need to replace them eco-friendly lighting is also more effective than other lighting.
As church’s have a different architectural design than other buildings, it is important that the correct lights are used for the different architecture. Lights can be used to light up the pointed roof of the church so is it not left dark.
Hidden lighting can be used behind arches to give it bright but without the sometimes ugly lamps on the walls.
LED Lighting For Churches
Some LED lights will have the option to change the colour of the lamps so the owner of church’s can change the colour of the lamps to correspond to what is currently happening. For example, when visitors are praying the colour may turn to violet which is a colour proven to make people more truthful and spiritual. The lights could also be dimmed and less intense as this makes people more relaxed and calm.
The colours and intensity of the lights can affect the whole atmosphere of the church as with a less intense violet colour used visitors in the church are more likely to be spiritual, perfect for a church where it is religious. Violet also makes visitors more calm as many people come to church’s just to sit down and think about their self, closed minded – another effect of the colour violet. The last effect of violet is that most people are noticeably more truthful, and in church religious people do not want to be lying as this is usually frowned upon.
The lights used are extremely eco-friendly so perfect for significantly lowering the running costs of a church. The lamps outside to light up the exterior, car parks and area around the church use solar panels on the top of the lamps so they can generate and store energy from the sun during daylight hours and use it later during the night to keep the area lit up. If the energy runs out the light won’t turn off it’ll use energy from the national grid if allowed by the owner.
Through this use of solar panels no power from the national grid is required until the power runs out from the energy generated throughout the day. If the church is no longer paying for all of the power used in the night, it’ll cost less to run.
Light Placement in Churches
The placement of the lights in a church can be extremely important to get the maximum coverage for each light so less lights have to be used to cover a large area, the main church nave. Also having the lights too far apart would create an uneven intensity of lighting across the church with even some parts of the church not being lit at all.
The height of some of the wall lights is even important as the higher up a light fixture is up a wall the larger the area it will cover however the area it does cover will also be dimmer. So having the lights coverage cross over can make the area on the floor have the most even intensity.
If the owner wants the lighting fixtures to be higher and the area to still have an even and a high intensity the Watt’s needed to power the bulb will have to be higher so the overall running costs of the building will be higher.
However if the fixture is too high up the wall it’ll create a ‘hot spot’ on the ceiling above, these are shapes of light above a lighting fixture that are usually a very high intensity.
The lighting designers also need to consider the different colours of the lights the lamp can change as different colours have different intensity’s that will cover different areas of floor space.
The centre of attention at a church is the Alter so this area needs sufficient lighting. Focused light is usually used from all angles to create no shadows that could distract an audience watching. The Alter could be lit with more intense light (spotlight) to make clear where the main focus point of the building is.
The wiring inside of a church can be very old so lighting designers must make sure that the current wires in the church have enough capacity to light all of the lights in the building adequately. If not the whole wiring inside of a church may have to change or the lights used altered to be able to run with the current wiring.
