A lighting scheme that is 3.5 times more energy efficient and is many times more flexible than its predecessor has been installed by Sutton Vane Associates at Mercers’ Hall, the home of the premier livery company in the City of London.

Cold cathode installed in the 1950s made the chapel look flat and gloomy and detracted from the beauty of its dome. Sutton Vane Associates has replaced it with a modern, fully dimmable, cold cathode system from the original supplier, Oldham. This is not only eco-friendly but also suits the wide range of uses to which the chapel is put including weddings and concerts.

The second phase of the project involved lighting the Ambulatory, a broad, low-ceilinged basement level space with no natural light, which leads to the hall chapel. The Ambulatory has columns on two sides and a coffered ceiling.  It had been previously been lit by inefficient, 300Watt, freestanding uplights which simultaneously caused glare and cast the lower half of the room into semidarkness. Sutton Vane Associates replaced these with a system that unusually for a heritage project allows the room to operate entirely using LEDs in day-to-day use.

The layout of downlights within the ceiling coffers was key to the overall look of the room and small adjustable fittings were used instead of the more common large compact fluorescent downlights.

Rather than use the traditional tungsten halogen MR16 downlights a compact LED downlight was used that gives a warm white light (3000K) with high colour rendering. Additionally, the source was recessed deep into the fitting, reducing glare. Each column also contains four warm white LED uplights. The challenge in uplighting the columns was to find a fitting that was small enough to be recessed in the base while fully illuminating the column from all sides.

In addition to LED, compact fluorescent wall wash luminaires were used along the perimeter and the lamps on the chandeliers were replaced with the new tungsten halogen capsule bulbs. These give a longer lamp life and are much more efficient than standard tungsten and are fully dimmable and retain the sparkle which cannot be found in compact fluorescent lamps.

The new scheme is more 3.5 times more efficient, using 1.3KW compared to the previous 4.7KW. The scheme is fully dimmable and all circuits can be adjusted either manually using sliders or using pre-programmed scenes. This allows for scenes which use far less energy if applicable or for maximum brightness for special events/functions. Dimmable tungsten halogen spotlights were also installed to light statues in the chapel, and new controls were added and the overall lighting reprogrammed to take this into account.