Shining the Light of Covenant
BY PAT BURGESS
Brent Tarleton and I, both long term Covenant members, met in 2018, during a “Spring Cleaning Week.” We were both retired and had the desire to stay productively busy. We also agreed the church buildings would look better with proper lighting, so this became our joint project.
The Narthex and Steeple were pre-pandemic projects. The first lighting change was the addition of side lighting at both ends of the Narthex.
The construction of the Welcome Center caused the steeple to lose its illumination from the old, high powered, incandescent ground lights. Our solution was lighting on each of the four sides of the three upper, vertical sections of the steeple with a total of 470 watts of 4000 Kelvin LED flood lights (photocell controlled) which replaced thousands of watts of the old, incandescent ground lights.
In 2020, the Covenant campus closed due to the pandemic, which provided the perfect opportunity for us to work on the lighting projects we were imagining and designing. With an empty church we could leave our newly donated scaffolding (thank you, Thomas Barnhardt) assembled for months as we worked on the lighting projects — because retired folks just don’t move very fast!
Over the past five years, with occasional help from other church members, Brent and I have touched virtually every light on the church’s campus. We replaced incandescent lighting with LED lighting, altered fixtures to provide more illumination, and added lights to the darker corners of our worship spaces. The LED lights save electricity expenses with reduced wattage but also significantly reduce the cost of maintenance with less frequent bulb exchanges.
Pat Burgess has a graduate degree in electrical engineering and Brent Tarleton has overseen building construction and installations across the country. Visit the link below to see details of their Covenant work in
20 different areas with notes about electricial usage.
Click the button below to see more comparisons of old and new illumination in more than 20 specific areas with notes about the electrical usage (watts) of the old and new.
Brent Tarleton and I, both long term Covenant members, met in 2018, during a “Spring Cleaning Week.” We were both retired and had the desire to stay productively busy. We also agreed the church buildings would look better with proper lighting, so this became our joint project.
The Narthex and Steeple were pre-pandemic projects. The first lighting change was the addition of side lighting at both ends of the Narthex.
The construction of the Welcome Center caused the steeple to lose its illumination from the old, high powered, incandescent ground lights. Our solution was lighting on each of the four sides of the three upper, vertical sections of the steeple with a total of 470 watts of 4000 Kelvin LED flood lights (photocell controlled) which replaced thousands of watts of the old, incandescent ground lights.
In 2020, the Covenant campus closed due to the pandemic, which provided the perfect opportunity for us to work on the lighting projects we were imagining and designing. With an empty church we could leave our newly donated scaffolding (thank you, Thomas Barnhardt) assembled for months as we worked on the lighting projects — because retired folks just don’t move very fast!
Over the past five years, with occasional help from other church members, Brent and I have touched virtually every light on the church’s campus. We replaced incandescent lighting with LED lighting, altered fixtures to provide more illumination, and added lights to the darker corners of our worship spaces. The LED lights save electricity expenses with reduced wattage but also significantly reduce the cost of maintenance with less frequent bulb exchanges.
Pat Burgess has a graduate degree in electrical engineering and Brent Tarleton has overseen building construction and installations across the country. Visit the link below to see details of their Covenant work in
20 different areas with notes about electricial usage.
Click the button below to see more comparisons of old and new illumination in more than 20 specific areas with notes about the electrical usage (watts) of the old and new.
