In the capital city of Scotland, the Edinburgh Castle is a major visitor attraction due to its historical significance and architectural beauty. This iconic symbol, which dominates Edinburgh’s skyline, houses both the crown jewels and National War Museum of Scotland, and remains home to an operational military station.
Pharos partner LITE ltd was commissioned to work with Historic Scotland to revamp the Castle’s existing 10-year old lighting with an LED solution. When the project began, a wireless control system was rejected due to the thick stone walls making signal strength unusable. In order to preserve the fabric of the building the use of existing floodlight positions and mounting brackets was requested when possible. As only the existing lighting infrastructure could be used, the Philips IntelliPower system was a perfect fit.
The 384,670 sq ft (35, 737m2) fortress holds frequent large-scale events, including the Edinburgh Tattoo, St. Andrew’s Day, Hogmanay and Erskine Week, the commemoration of the passing of 70 years since the D-Day Landings for which the castle was illuminated purple.
The previous conventional lighting system required several days of cumbersome labour to apply gels to the fixtures to create coloured lighting effects onto the castle’s façade and perimeter stone walls. In addition, there was a substantial running cost to maintain the conventional fixtures. The replacement Philips ColorReach and Color Graze LEDs are programmed by a Pharos LPC 1 to enable activation by photocells to automatically turn on when darkness falls, and be turned off by a timer at set intervals with resulting ecological benefits.
