The back wall of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre now can effortlessly shift from aqua and magenta to yellow and lime green because of environmentally friendly lighting installed by staff members.
New 6-foot long light-emitting diode (LED) strip lights in the rafters and on the floor of the stage use less than one-sixth the energy of the older, more traditional bulbs that once helped light the stage.
This past summer as Senior Performance Hall Operations Manager Barry LaRue thought about capital expenditures, energy conservation and the stage lighting in U-M’s various theaters, he says “a light bulb went off.” Remembering the green initiatives on campus, specifically Planet Blue, LaRue started making calls to see what could be done to integrate environmentally friendly lighting into the theaters.
Andrew Cieslinski, an energy management engineer at Plant Engineering and Planet Blue, was one of LaRue’s main contacts. “There are people who throw us ideas and … we get (solutions) from these people or come up with them on our own,” he says.
Cieslinski estimates the new lights would save U-M $5,000 a year, or 60,000 kilowatt hours a year, in lighting costs. Plus, they are expected to use a little more than 10 percent of the energy the original bulbs used. LED’s last much longer than the original bulbs, so replacement costs also were factored into the proposal.
Plant Engineering and Planet Blue provided a $45,000 grant for the $70,000 project. The new lights were installed Nov. 28-30 in Mendelssohn Theatre by staff members of the University Productions Department.
David Pickell, backstage operations manager at Mendelssohn, helped install the lights. He soldered data cables to connect the strip lights with the main switchboard controlling the stage lighting — all in time for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of “Ruddigore or the Witches Curse” in December.
“The technology that is available now allows for LED lights to be red, blue or green in color,” LaRue says, “so by mixing these colors, you can get any color of the rainbow.”
“They are easier to use, use less energy and allow us to get any color mix we want,” Pickell says. “The only downside I can see is the ability to turn someone green.”
Pickell demonstrated this on the back wall — or cyclorama — of the stage, fluidly changing the spectrum of colors. “Green used to rarely ever be used in strip lighting because it would make someone look sickly.
“The way these lights are, you can program them to emit different colors at different intervals,” he says, “and with the way (we) can mix colors, we can display one of a million colors every 6 inches in a light.”
The lights also have provided an opportunity for learning. “It is students who will mostly be using these new lights,” LaRue says, “so it gives them a chance to work with some state-of-the-art technology.”
Theater employees also plan to use the new strips as work lights. “The old work lights were 500 watt light bulbs, while these strip lights altogether take up 450 watts. We’d only need to use the lights at 80 percent of their power, so that’s even less wattage and even more energy savings,” LaRue says.
