LED Savings Calculator

Several years ago, after learning the hard way (via hot broken glass) that halogen lamps have a limited life span, I created a maintenance schedule for periodically replacing lamps in twelve front wash lights, eight ellipsoidals, and four PAR64 fixtures in our main auditorium. I learned two things very quickly: first, that 1000W lamps get incredibly hot, and second, renting a lift simply to replace lamps is a bit of a pain.

I had looked into LED replacements, but initially dismissed them because of their cost. However, when I took the time to figure out exactly what the energy costs savings would be, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, there would certainly be an up-front cost to replace all the lights, but the savings from lower wattage fixtures and lower maintenance costs would only take a few years to make up. In other words, the sooner we made the switch, the sooner we'd start saving money.

In our situation, moving to LED fixtures also came with another advantage: DMX control of each fixture. The existing twelve front wash lights were connected to a line dimmer in pairs, so while each dimmer channel could be controlled via DMX, that DMX channel was controlling two lights at a time. This limited the flexibility we had in lighting the stage.

In the end, doing my homework and coming up with a concrete cost analysis made it clear when it came time to budget (and more importantly, having that budget scrutinized and approved) that a move to LEDs made not only good creative sense, but good financial sense.

So, if you’re trying to convince your church to replace old high wattage lamps with LED fixtures, you can save a copy of this modified version of the spreadsheet I created when doing my own cost analysis and adjust it to your own needs. In it, you’ll find numerous variables highlighted in orange that you can change to fit your church’s situation. I looked at replacing two types of fixtures, but you could add additional fixture types, modify maintenance costs, etc.

We’re currently in the middle of this upgrade, so I’ll follow up with some installation details in another post once all the fixtures have been replaced.