I did an install with 64 of their 30w rgbw low voltage lights and can confirm it's very labor intensive. Lots of home runs (you can do 4 fixtures on a home run with the 30w units), and 10 wire nuts per fixture. BUT I do this for a living and love what I do so I didn't mind all the labor involved. Just weigh cost of installation vs cost of fixture when making a decision on those. For the low voltage setup you will pay less for the fixtures but more for install...unless there is no existing AC power to the lighting locations, then you're going to pay quite a bit for an electrician to run AC for the already more expensive fixtures. More about the install with the 30w fixtures...I went below the recommendation because of budget reasons. I think they recommend 6-8ft spacing on those and I was around 12ft spacing with a 15ft ceiling (recessed fixtures). It is barely enough light in there when you want full brightness. It would be nice to have more headroom. The 50w units would have been perfect but that's more money per fixture and twice the home runs and power driver units. So considering the budget I had to work with I was pretty happy with the end result. It's a massive improvement over the nasty fluorescent lights they were using. It's a very nice even light with no hot spots and the full color mixing ability is great. One more thing to note...as mentioned in the video, the power drivers have some pretty loud fans so they definitely need to be located in a closet or somewhere that noise doesn't matter. And the fans are constant power, so they aren't regulated by temperature. They're running full speed all the time whether lights are being powered or not. I love Springtree and the solutions they provide (and really good people to work with) but this is a design oversight in my opinion. The power drivers need to be able to go into standby when not sending power to the lights. The cost of design and implementation for something like this would increase the cost of the unit by a fraction of what electricity cost would be for fans to run over the lifetime of the unit, not to mention the longevity of the unit decreases when running 24/7.
We recently did a lighting upgrade in our auditorium and we used the Springtree RGBW low voltage setup. The space seats about 400 and has a balcony (100'x40'). We used a combination of 50w and 30W pendants and recessed lights driven by 4x 1800w driver boxes. We have 108 fixtures on 45 zones. Overall we are very pleased with the results. RGBW is 100% worth it. The houselights tie seamlessly into our stage lights and allow us to set the mood and ambiance of the room. For the main area we have 22' ceilings and we primarily used the 50W pendents with a 7' on center spacing. It's more light that we need. Full power is a cool white. Warm white will pulls the intensity down some. We run a warm white (about 3500k) at 75% intensity and that is more than enough for our services. The white color of the RGBW is a warm white so it's actually really easy to dial in your desired light temperature. What Ryland said about the width of the light throw is true, they are very wide, so if you are concerned with light spill, this is a consideration. Spill is not an issue for our room. Spring tree offers a complete solution which solves all of our use cases. We use a desktop DMX switch with a wall mount slave. During service we switch to software DMX control. Otherwise it's wall switch controlled with 8 programmable settings. It's incredibly easy for anyone to use. Also, as mentioned in the video, the power drivers have loud fans and they run all the time. This is a major planning factor for an install as they need acoustical isolation and ventilation. There is no stand by mode and SpringTree says they are designed to stay on 24/7. I'm not sure I like that answer but we haven't had an issue so far. Wiring and install is straight forward, but may require significant changes to your existing wiring. We did our entire project for about $22k in parts/materials. 18 months later we have no regrets. Given the cost/performance/value of the complete solution we got from SpringTree, I would be hard for me to even consider anything else on the market.
Ryland, I know they are expensive but we went with the Chalice LED's from Altman lights. We have had them installed now for 2 years in a gym/auditorium style space and they have been great. Very nice warm white. I think they also do an RGBW version as well.
Hi, Im a lighting designer and tech for theatre and I've seen this a few times. I would highly recomend going the extra mile and spending money on something like ETC arch system or Elation. If the fixtures need to last 20 years with minimum to no intervention, fixtures like the ones in this video, driven by basic mosfet led controllers tend to have a short life span. The standard lifespan for most brand electrical appliances is 10 years (something I doubt these products will meet). I think it would be worth spending the money on quality and safety and something like ETC that will have your back for life. Thought I'd pop my opinion into the hat.
I'd have to say I agree whole heartedly. The company I work for is an ETC dealer. I have been installing their products for years. I have been to the factory and done some training a couple of times and these people know lighting. Yes, they do come with an upfront cost, but you won't be on your third Sunday using the system and look up and see one is already not turning on. They manufacture high quality products in the US (Wisconsin) and the LED engines have a 10 year warranty. I've seen (and removed) systems where people from the church tried to do the job themselves and it didn't really work out. Though some were great. This is not meant to be taken as a slight at all! Many of our clients are churches and I very much understand being good stewards of church finances. However, lighting professionals exist for a reason. To add to that ETC products are all UL listed and some products are UL 924 listed to be used for life safety and emergency lighting / emergency lighting power control. I don't know a whole lot about Elation products. I know they make good quality stuff, but ETC has an entire division of the company dedicated to architectural lighting and it sounds like what you are looking for is a house lighting system that can be controlled via dmx and at a wall station so when somone comes in to vaccum you don't have to fire up the console. I am obviously very biased, but I believe in their quality and have sent things in that are 20 years old for repair and had them back 2 weeks later - reinstalled and working good as new. I am certain there is an ETC dealer somewhere near you. If you are at all interested in having someone come look at your space call the number on their website and ask who the nearest dealer is. You will get someone on the phone sitting in the front office the first time you call. If you end up going with them I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Good luck with your project!
We recently built an 800 seat Worship Center similar in style to the renderings you showed. We used the Warm White Springtree spatial pendants and have been very happy with them . We are currently building a smaller second campus facility and I have a bunch of 50w lovo pendants waiting to go in. Both fixtures are great, but I agree with you that the lovos would not be appropriate for the scale of your renovated facility. I can't speak to the RGBWW pendants, but the WW stuff is great. We have a little over a year under our belt in the new facility. I had similar hesitations regarding the longevity of the fixtures, especially since they do have fans. Ultimately it came down to a couple of factors. 1. Price- I realized that I could replace the fixtures several times over for what it would cost me to get the primo fixture you mentioned. 2- Trust--Springtree is amazing to work with and I trust them. They make innovative products and they understand the importance of value, especially in the Church space. Also, their support & people are great. I don't have any worries about them standing behind their product. BTW- We also purchased the Springtree LED wall and have had a great experience with that as well.
@@RylandRussell I do not consider the fan noise obtrusive at all. If I walk into the room completely silent and empty and turn on the lights I can hear a very slight hum from the fans ramping up. We have 52 pendants. I would say the total noise they make is significantly less than the noise of the 10 Rogue R2 wash and 4 Maverick spot fixtures we also have running.
You can actually daisy chain the LoVo lights as long as you stay under the wattage. the controller you have is 50watts per port, so with that controller and light shown yes, you would need home runs for the 3 fixtures. If you used the lower wattage fixtures they have you could daisy chain and have 3 groups of fixtures. The larger controllers also have more power per port, the largest controller able to do 150 watts per output, though recommend to do 120 per port
Hey Ryland, thanks for all you do to assist churches with tech. Your review of Springtree products came at a great time .Like you I appreciate their products, and am tasked with putting together lighting for a new auditorium for a church plant I’m involved with. My question is what would you recommend for basic overhead lighting that only needs to be warm white. Our ceiling high goes from 16 to 24 feet. Are the Springtree lights overspending? We will use a mixture of their wash fixtures along with the Boulder moving heads you recommend for stage lighting. What say you?
We are building a brand new church, and decided to add hue light 💡 bulbs (we have 50 ) we are building a church for 500 plus people and they basically do the same we only spent 2k on these bulbs 💡. And they work great. And they work on light key
Chauvet core par 120s are great if you are wanting another cheap alternative. I know you said 20 years out of these - I don’t think you will get 10 years out of even the higher end fixtures.
Our integrator got some great pricing on elation fuze pendants and fuze compacts. I’ve heard mixed reviews on CANTO from Facebook church groups. We may go with the small pendants for our youth space!
Thanks for the video. Not a lot of Springtree-specific demos out there. Would have appreciated actually seeing the output of the 2nd fixture - the 50W - as apposed to talking about it.
I just did an install of 20 of these springtree pendants in an auditorium. I don't think I'll be recommending them on another install. 4 of them arrived with cracked plastic frames. Springtree sent replacements but I had to take them apart and replace them myself. The phoenix connector just takes too long to install in my opinion. I'd much rather just plug in a dmx cable into the light then chop them up and splice wires together. Once I got them installed they generally worked ok, but sometimes one of them would stay on, not change to the exact color, random weirdness like that. If i turned it off and on again they worked, but not 100% reliable every time. All in all, you get what you pay for. That's my experience with them.
The pendant and the flat’s color do not match which is problematic when you are using them in the same space. You cannot make the same white out of the color mixing models.
I would highly recommend avoiding Springtree house lights. We have a fairly large 3 year old Springtree 120w house light install and have had nothing but problems with it. The colors vary drastically between fixtures and we've had over a dozen failures. The money "saved" on the front end will catch up with you a few years down the road.
Here are some brightness comps and tests I did ruclips.net/video/LGC9uaWD17M/видео.htmlsi=NuqLo-naW8xcPdrd
I did an install with 64 of their 30w rgbw low voltage lights and can confirm it's very labor intensive. Lots of home runs (you can do 4 fixtures on a home run with the 30w units), and 10 wire nuts per fixture. BUT I do this for a living and love what I do so I didn't mind all the labor involved. Just weigh cost of installation vs cost of fixture when making a decision on those. For the low voltage setup you will pay less for the fixtures but more for install...unless there is no existing AC power to the lighting locations, then you're going to pay quite a bit for an electrician to run AC for the already more expensive fixtures.
More about the install with the 30w fixtures...I went below the recommendation because of budget reasons. I think they recommend 6-8ft spacing on those and I was around 12ft spacing with a 15ft ceiling (recessed fixtures). It is barely enough light in there when you want full brightness. It would be nice to have more headroom. The 50w units would have been perfect but that's more money per fixture and twice the home runs and power driver units. So considering the budget I had to work with I was pretty happy with the end result. It's a massive improvement over the nasty fluorescent lights they were using. It's a very nice even light with no hot spots and the full color mixing ability is great.
One more thing to note...as mentioned in the video, the power drivers have some pretty loud fans so they definitely need to be located in a closet or somewhere that noise doesn't matter. And the fans are constant power, so they aren't regulated by temperature. They're running full speed all the time whether lights are being powered or not. I love Springtree and the solutions they provide (and really good people to work with) but this is a design oversight in my opinion. The power drivers need to be able to go into standby when not sending power to the lights. The cost of design and implementation for something like this would increase the cost of the unit by a fraction of what electricity cost would be for fans to run over the lifetime of the unit, not to mention the longevity of the unit decreases when running 24/7.
We recently did a lighting upgrade in our auditorium and we used the Springtree RGBW low voltage setup. The space seats about 400 and has a balcony (100'x40'). We used a combination of 50w and 30W pendants and recessed lights driven by 4x 1800w driver boxes. We have 108 fixtures on 45 zones. Overall we are very pleased with the results. RGBW is 100% worth it. The houselights tie seamlessly into our stage lights and allow us to set the mood and ambiance of the room. For the main area we have 22' ceilings and we primarily used the 50W pendents with a 7' on center spacing. It's more light that we need. Full power is a cool white. Warm white will pulls the intensity down some. We run a warm white (about 3500k) at 75% intensity and that is more than enough for our services. The white color of the RGBW is a warm white so it's actually really easy to dial in your desired light temperature. What Ryland said about the width of the light throw is true, they are very wide, so if you are concerned with light spill, this is a consideration. Spill is not an issue for our room. Spring tree offers a complete solution which solves all of our use cases. We use a desktop DMX switch with a wall mount slave. During service we switch to software DMX control. Otherwise it's wall switch controlled with 8 programmable settings. It's incredibly easy for anyone to use. Also, as mentioned in the video, the power drivers have loud fans and they run all the time. This is a major planning factor for an install as they need acoustical isolation and ventilation. There is no stand by mode and SpringTree says they are designed to stay on 24/7. I'm not sure I like that answer but we haven't had an issue so far. Wiring and install is straight forward, but may require significant changes to your existing wiring. We did our entire project for about $22k in parts/materials. 18 months later we have no regrets. Given the cost/performance/value of the complete solution we got from SpringTree, I would be hard for me to even consider anything else on the market.
Thanks so much for sharing your experience with them! Very cool.
I love Elation Fixtures, you will never go wrong with them!
Ryland, I know they are expensive but we went with the Chalice LED's from Altman lights. We have had them installed now for 2 years in a gym/auditorium style space and they have been great. Very nice warm white. I think they also do an RGBW version as well.
Hi, Im a lighting designer and tech for theatre and I've seen this a few times. I would highly recomend going the extra mile and spending money on something like ETC arch system or Elation. If the fixtures need to last 20 years with minimum to no intervention, fixtures like the ones in this video, driven by basic mosfet led controllers tend to have a short life span. The standard lifespan for most brand electrical appliances is 10 years (something I doubt these products will meet). I think it would be worth spending the money on quality and safety and something like ETC that will have your back for life. Thought I'd pop my opinion into the hat.
I'd have to say I agree whole heartedly. The company I work for is an ETC dealer. I have been installing their products for years. I have been to the factory and done some training a couple of times and these people know lighting. Yes, they do come with an upfront cost, but you won't be on your third Sunday using the system and look up and see one is already not turning on. They manufacture high quality products in the US (Wisconsin) and the LED engines have a 10 year warranty. I've seen (and removed) systems where people from the church tried to do the job themselves and it didn't really work out. Though some were great. This is not meant to be taken as a slight at all! Many of our clients are churches and I very much understand being good stewards of church finances. However, lighting professionals exist for a reason.
To add to that ETC products are all UL listed and some products are UL 924 listed to be used for life safety and emergency lighting / emergency lighting power control.
I don't know a whole lot about Elation products. I know they make good quality stuff, but ETC has an entire division of the company dedicated to architectural lighting and it sounds like what you are looking for is a house lighting system that can be controlled via dmx and at a wall station so when somone comes in to vaccum you don't have to fire up the console.
I am obviously very biased, but I believe in their quality and have sent things in that are 20 years old for repair and had them back 2 weeks later - reinstalled and working good as new. I am certain there is an ETC dealer somewhere near you. If you are at all interested in having someone come look at your space call the number on their website and ask who the nearest dealer is. You will get someone on the phone sitting in the front office the first time you call.
If you end up going with them I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Good luck with your project!
We recently built an 800 seat Worship Center similar in style to the renderings you showed. We used the Warm White Springtree spatial pendants and have been very happy with them . We are currently building a smaller second campus facility and I have a bunch of 50w lovo pendants waiting to go in. Both fixtures are great, but I agree with you that the lovos would not be appropriate for the scale of your renovated facility. I can't speak to the RGBWW pendants, but the WW stuff is great. We have a little over a year under our belt in the new facility. I had similar hesitations regarding the longevity of the fixtures, especially since they do have fans. Ultimately it came down to a couple of factors. 1. Price- I realized that I could replace the fixtures several times over for what it would cost me to get the primo fixture you mentioned. 2- Trust--Springtree is amazing to work with and I trust them. They make innovative products and they understand the importance of value, especially in the Church space. Also, their support & people are great. I don't have any worries about them standing behind their product.
BTW- We also purchased the Springtree LED wall and have had a great experience with that as well.
Awesome to hear from a longtime user! What are your thoughts on fan noise on the pendants?
@@RylandRussell I do not consider the fan noise obtrusive at all. If I walk into the room completely silent and empty and turn on the lights I can hear a very slight hum from the fans ramping up. We have 52 pendants. I would say the total noise they make is significantly less than the noise of the 10 Rogue R2 wash and 4 Maverick spot fixtures we also have running.
Planning on house light replacement in about a year, replacing Ketra. Considering the Fuze Pendants.
Hope this was helpful. I’d definitely do the test units and see them in your space.
You can actually daisy chain the LoVo lights as long as you stay under the wattage. the controller you have is 50watts per port, so with that controller and light shown yes, you would need home runs for the 3 fixtures. If you used the lower wattage fixtures they have you could daisy chain and have 3 groups of fixtures. The larger controllers also have more power per port, the largest controller able to do 150 watts per output, though recommend to do 120 per port
Hey Ryland, thanks for all you do to assist churches with tech. Your review of Springtree products came at a great time
.Like you I appreciate their products, and am tasked with
putting together lighting for a new auditorium for a church plant I’m involved with.
My question is what would you recommend for basic overhead lighting that only needs to be warm white. Our ceiling high goes from 16 to 24 feet. Are the Springtree lights overspending?
We will use a mixture of their wash fixtures along with the Boulder moving heads you recommend for stage lighting.
What say you?
The spatial flats are really swell and make the best white - I wish they made a 100 watt model.
We are building a brand new church, and decided to add hue light 💡 bulbs (we have 50 ) we are building a church for 500 plus people and they basically do the same we only spent 2k on these bulbs 💡. And they work great. And they work on light key
Also considering this path, and hoping Ikea brings back their RGBW Hue-compatible Tradfri bulbs to do it.
Chauvet core par 120s are great if you are wanting another cheap alternative.
I know you said 20 years out of these - I don’t think you will get 10 years out of even the higher end fixtures.
What were the original bulbs/fixtures you guys were using? My church is currently using Phillips Hue lights and it's a nightmare to say the least.
9:18 what did you ultimately decide?
Any consideration / experience with retrofit from CANTO. May compete at that price point
Our integrator got some great pricing on elation fuze pendants and fuze compacts. I’ve heard mixed reviews on CANTO from Facebook church groups. We may go with the small pendants for our youth space!
Thanks for the video. Not a lot of Springtree-specific demos out there. Would have appreciated actually seeing the output of the 2nd fixture - the 50W - as apposed to talking about it.
Ask and you shall receive ruclips.net/video/LGC9uaWD17M/видео.html
@@RylandRussell Wonderful! Thanks!!
I just did an install of 20 of these springtree pendants in an auditorium. I don't think I'll be recommending them on another install.
4 of them arrived with cracked plastic frames. Springtree sent replacements but I had to take them apart and replace them myself. The phoenix connector just takes too long to install in my opinion. I'd much rather just plug in a dmx cable into the light then chop them up and splice wires together. Once I got them installed they generally worked ok, but sometimes one of them would stay on, not change to the exact color, random weirdness like that. If i turned it off and on again they worked, but not 100% reliable every time.
All in all, you get what you pay for. That's my experience with them.
Thanks so much for the real world insights! Valuable info.
The pendant and the flat’s color do not match which is problematic when you are using them in the same space. You cannot make the same white out of the color mixing models.
I would highly recommend avoiding Springtree house lights. We have a fairly large 3 year old Springtree 120w house light install and have had nothing but problems with it. The colors vary drastically between fixtures and we've had over a dozen failures. The money "saved" on the front end will catch up with you a few years down the road.
Thank you for sharing your first hand experience! So yours are the larger pendants?
@@RylandRussell Yes, the 120w Spatial Pendants.