Essex Christmas lights trails promise "more lights" despite rising energy costs
The company have adapted LED lightbulbs to save money
A company which creates immersive Christmas light trails across Essex says they've been hit hard by the rising cost of energy, but promises that won't get in the way of their popular light displays during the holidays.
Carl Miller is a producer at Enlightened Moments, which will have trails in Colchester Castle Park, Highlands Estate in Chelmsford and Barleylands in Billericay this festive season.
He says the rising energy costs are having a 'significant' impact on their business: "Although the light trails are only live for five or six weeks at Christmas time, we spend all year round preparing for them, manufacturing elements and producing necessary things.
"In terms of the pre-production costs, with energy prices having gone up, that's added to our costs, and it's not a cost that we can really pass on to the customer either, because we want to try and keep the ticket as economical as possible, so that has hurt us.
"However, we do think there's a massive thirst for this type of activity, so we've managed to increase our capacity to offset the costs when it comes to the trails themselves."
He says they've rethought their energy sources to keep costs down - but says the lights will be just as impressive: "All of the lighting on all of our trails is now completely LED, so there are no old tungsten energy-hungry lights. We're also working towards battery powered solutions for a lot of our installations and are just making sure to be as economic as possible in our designs."
Carl insists, though, that this hasn't led to a compromise in design, or fewer bulbs, and that the trails will be as spectacular as ever: "It actually means we'll have more lights. Because we're using LED bulbs, there are no bulbs to change - they're an encapsulated unit - so we can invest for the longer term and put more lighting at each location."
Whilst the rising cost of energy has made life a little more difficult, Carl is trying to look on the bright side: "What it's doing is forcing us to be more environmentally friendly as an event, which we wanted to do anyway, this is just making us act sooner, which is a positive.
"Of course, financially, costs of producing the trails has gone up significantly for us, which is a burden we're having to bare, but we're doing our best to mitigate the issue."
Despite the public contending with the cost of living crisis, Carl's still expecting lots of interest in the trails this year: "The uptake is down slightly on where we've been in previous years, but in previous years, we were living with Covid, and light trails were one of the few things you could actually do, so there was always going to be a big burst of energy for this type of activity two or three years ago.
"Obviously now there's lots of things you can do indoors and outdoors at Christmas, so there's a lot more competition... but we're still seeing the thirst for the events. "Last year at Highlands House we sold about 45,000 tickets and we're hoping to do the same at all three events this year."