Fox Talbot Museum

LED FOR THE FAMOUS FOX TALBOT MUSEUM AT NATIONAL TRUST’S LACOCK ABBEY

National Trust’s Fox Talbot Museum is the home of the life works of photographer William Henry Fox Talbot. Set in beautiful monastic surrounding of Wiltshire’s Lacock Abbey.

This historic attraction has a layout typical of many museums with long stretches of displays and cabinets combined with smaller areas for specific parts of the experience.

The Proposal & Solution

The existing lighting within the Fox Talbot museum consisted of over 130 35W Halogen reflectors burning over 4500 watts between them. Lighting Services were asked to help bring in a more efficient solution but without upsetting the effects of the current lighting system which, with exception of efficiency, worked well for this environment.

The most obvious solutions was to retrofit an energy saving MR16 reflector to replace all the halogen lamps directly on the existing track. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) given their shape and size would not have been a plausible solution. CFL technology also gives off high UV and infra-red. Again, not ideal for an historic setting.

We decided to use a ‘Perfect Fit’ 4W MR16 Philips Master LED lamp. LEDs had been used successfully in other historical projects we had worked on and the light output was the equivalent of the 35 watt halogen lamps they were replacing. The MR16 4W LED lamps also had no size issues at all and due to their nature LEDs also contain no UV or infra-red in the light beams.

The Energy Saving

The existing halogen lighting in Fox Talbot was using approximately £1600 in energy a year. The LEDs on the other hand cost only less than £190 to run annually generating a saving in excess of £1400 on energy alone

A forecasted payback period for the Fox Talbot museum stands at less than 22 months against the cost of the new products. With each lamp forecast a lifetime of over 25,000 hours, 8 years for a typical National Trust property, it is no surprise that LED is starting to be used in numerous installations throughout the National Trust. We have even installed Philips Master Led Lamps with lifetimes of up to 45,000 hours into properties including Dunster Castle, Trust New Art and Quarry Bank Mill.