St. Paul's Lutheran Church Finds Power in Prayer and Power Protection From Furman

St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, in Hanover, PA has a new sound system. A JBL VRX system was installed in a center cluster earlier this year, vastly improving the church’s overall sound and especially the intelligibility of the spoken word in the 400-seat sanctuary. With that, St. Paul’s joins the trend of houses of worship that are improving and enhancing their audio, part of an effort to more effectively spread their message. However, St. Paul’s also has something that more churches should consider: comprehensive protection for their new sound system from power surges in their electrical system and from circuit overloads as systems are powered on. At St. Paul’s, that was accomplished by the integration of a Furman CN-1800S SmartSequencer™ 15-amp bidirectional power sequencer, installed by Lancaster, PA-based systems designer and integrator B&B Communications. They also installed Furman CN15MP MiniPort for amplifiers that power audio to overflow areas, such as the Fellowship Hall, extending the benefits of SmartSequencing to electronics outside of the main equipment rack.

“We spent the better part of three years working on this project, and we stressed to the church how important it is to include surge protection and sequential power-on capability,” explains Jeff Tate, Sales Engineer at B&B Communications. “The new sound system addresses all of the issues that the previous one couldn’t, such as speech intelligibility and even coverage of the seating areas. But as good as the new sound system is, a single power surge could damage or even destroy it. That’s not a chance worth taking.” 

One of the reasons that the project stretched over three years was that, like most churches, St. Paul’s has to manage its budget carefully. B&B Communications helped them with that, for instance by utilizing existing speakers in the distributed sound system that extends out to the overflow areas and adding new mixer-amplifiers to power and control them, all of which use the Furman PL-8C power conditioner. “In addition to the dangers of power surges and circuit overloads, leaving surge suppression and sequential power-on capability out of the system can also shorten the life of critical components such as speakers, when components like amplifiers all come on at once,” Tate cautions. “It can damage the drivers, for instance. But with products like the CN-1800S SmartSequencer and the CN15MP MiniPorts are used together, we can build a smarter network for power, one that conditions, sequences and protects. That’s why Furman is our go-to for anything that has to do with power. They’re simply the best.”

Solsound Chooses Furman CN Series SmartSequencers™ For Mid-Atlantic Community Church

Mid-Atlantic Community Church is typical of many young 21st-century churches: steady growth has prompted moves to larger temporary quarters even as it embarks on the first phase of what will become its own permanent campus of buildings in Crofton, Maryland. The church’s headquarters office is located in an office park warehouse. The congregation meets at Crofton Middle School every Sunday morning, after outgrowing its original space at Crofton Elementary School where its first services took place shortly after it was founded in 2004.

What the church, which offers children and adult ministries as well as annual activities and volunteer events in the community, needs most is flexibility when it comes to its media systems for its incipient new location. “The church’s FOH mixer was very specific about how he needed his systems to power on,” explained Art Reiger, founder and owner of Solsound (www.solsound.net), the Edgewater, Maryland based AV systems integrator that just completed the installation of an RCF line array sound system as well as a distributed paging system in the church’s new “gymnatorium,” a huge building that will house basketball courts, classrooms and a performance space. “He wanted the systems to have very specific delays between power-ons, to avoid any hiccups with components such as the IDR rack at back of house and the laptop he has connected to the FOH console.” 

“We had just completed [another] project where we used a Furman CN-2400S and a Furman CN-20MP, and the combination proved stellar,” he said. “For the Mid-Atlantic Community Church project, the Furman CN series units let us program the exact delay intervals between component power-ups. In some cases that was as much as two minutes. In fact, the Furman system can give you as much as seven minutes delay time. No other product can do that. Plus, the ease of installation is excellent. As long as the cabling is correct, you can customize each unit perfectly and quickly using the DIP switches. From a designer and an installer’s point of view, you can’t get that combination of a high degree of flexibility and ease of installation anywhere else.”Reiger had the solution, one that began with a Furman CN-1800S SmartSequencer™ 15-amp bidirectional power sequencer for the BOH rack’s 15-amp circuit and a CN-2400S 20-amp bidirectional power sequencer for the building’s FOH 20-amp circuit. Used in conjunction with several Furman CN-15MP and CN-20MP MiniPorts, the Contractor Series SmartSequencer™ bidirectional power sequencers give Reiger and his team everything they need to meet the client’s requirements. 

The Furman CN-1800S (15 amp capacity) and CN-2400S (20 amp capacity) SmartSequencers™ are designed for commercial A/V installers.  The units combine AC power distribution, protection, filtration, sequential system power on/off, and optional compatibility with Panamax/Furman’s BlueBOLT® hosted remote power and energy management platform.

The CN-1800S and CN-2400S feature Furman’s SmartSequencing™ technology, which allows large and complex A/V systems to be powered on and off safely with the simple press of a button or turn of a key, even by nontechnical personnel. The SmartSequencer’s bidirectional communications between installed units enables a primary unit to control and sequence multiple secondary units, ensuring that multi-zone electronic systems are powered on and off safely and dependably from a single control point across an entire installation. Units can be connected via current loop at runs of more than 1,000 feet, with backwards compatibility with Furman’s legacy sequencers and/or third-party products.

Providing robust control options, the CN-1800S and CN-2400S are equipped with RS-232 ports and command sets for PC control or integration with control systems. An optional RS-232-to-Ethernet adaptor — sold separately — adds full IP-addressability to the unit so it may be controlled, programmed, and monitored from any Web-enabled device with Panamax/Furman’s cloud-based BlueBOLT platform.