Why the unit price misleads
There are four cost lines and only one of them is negotiable after delivery. Hardware is bought once, artwork is bought repeatedly, installation is bought on site, and running cost is bought every month. Understanding which is which is what makes a wedding light budget accurate.
- Hardware — the fixture, lens and bracket
- Custom artwork — the gobo, and every re-cut after it
- Installation — access, power and making good
- Running cost — cleaning, power and replacement cycles
Hardware
Hardware scales with output and rating. A wedding light at the bottom of the 20–80 W range for a sheltered indoor position is a different product from one at the top of the range rated IP20 for an exposed facade — same category, very different bill. The jump is driven by the LED, the driver, the thermal design and the housing, in that order.
- Output, which sets the LED, driver and heatsink size
- Ingress rating, which sets the sealing and housing design
- Lens quality, which sets how much output reaches the wall
- Finish and hardware, which set how it survives the site
The recurring line
The artwork cost hides in the reorders. Engraving a glass gobo is not expensive per unit, but minimum quantities, shipping and the time spent re-approving artwork add up. Keep the original vector file, record the gobo reference, and every future reorder is a formality rather than a redesign.
- Engraving per unit, and any minimum quantity
- Artwork preparation if the supplied file needs work
- Shipping, especially on small reorders
- Lead time, and the cost of waiting
Installation, power and access
The surprise lines are access and power. A wedding light that needs a cherry picker, or a new switched spur run across a finished ceiling, can cost more to install than to buy. Both are visible in a ten-minute survey, which is why the survey is the cheapest part of the job.
- Access equipment — ladder, scaffold or powered platform
- Power run and any making good afterwards
- Out-of-hours or trading-hours working
- Fixings, bracket and cable management
Total cost of ownership
Total cost is dominated by whatever you have to do most often. If the wedding light is easy to reach, cleaning is trivial and cheap; if it needs scaffolding, it gets deferred, output declines, and eventually somebody replaces a unit that only needed a wipe. Design for access and the running cost halves.
- Hardware, once
- Artwork reorders, every rebrand or new site
- Cleaning, twice a year
- Power, continuously
Where to save and where not to
Save on image size, not on output. Halving the projected area doubles the contrast at the wall for nothing, and it lets a smaller wedding light do the same job. Do not save on the ingress rating, the bracket, or the artwork file — those three cuts cost more than they save within two years.
- Reduce the image size before increasing the output
- Standardise the gobo size across every site
- Choose a surface with lower ambient light
- Keep the original vector artwork file
