KVLY, the NBC affiliate in Fargo, ND, is using Litepanels fixtures for its new news studio and is finding a number of benefits. The LED lighting is energy-efficient, cool to the touch and very dependable.
“With our old tungsten lights, every time we turned them on it was an adventure,” said Jeff Petrik, the station operations manager. “It would be five minutes before the newscast, one of our camera operators would turn on studio lighting, and we would have bulbs that needed replacing.”
Not only did it mean replacing bulbs at the last minute, Petrik said it also distracted the crew from final preparations for their challenging newscast production. Sometimes Petrik would get a call from the newsroom wondering why an anchor was not sitting in her normal position on the set. The answer was usually that a light blew and they didn’t have time to fix it.
Litepanels LED lighting fixtures can be expected to last well over 10 years in normal operation, the ultimate in dependability. “Since we got Litepanels, we’ve had no problems,” said Petrik. “When you turn the lights on, they’re there.”
Steve Mulkey of Redwood Media Group served as the lighting designer/integrator for installation of Litepanels at KVLY.
The station is using 30 Litepanels 1x1 fixtures, which feature an array of LED bulbs on a 1ft x 1ft (30cm x 30cm) square panel. The fixtures can be positioned further back and higher, out of the way, and dimmed to the exact intensity. In particular, none of the Spot or SuperSpot Litepanels fixtures used as backlights are run at more than 50 percent intensity.
In addition to the considerable annual budget savings for energy to light the studios and reduced air-conditioning needs because their new fixtures generate no heat, Litepanels has provided a complete lighting solution to streamline Fargo’s KVLY studio newscast production.
