What's your realistic budget?
Here has been my personal experience with several different "
shoebox" dimming products:
At entry-level is the the
Leviton/NSI D4-DMX. This
unit offers four
triac driven
dimmer channels with
circuit breakers rated at 10 amps (1200 watts). They contain modest toroidal chokes that quiets lamps down some. These sell for about $250 from most internet retailers. The main
power cord is 6' 14
awg with a standard 15 amp.
edison molded male
connector. I have regularly run 2 (or sometimes more, but that's another story) 1000
watt loads on these packs and never had any trouble with
tripping breakers, melted connectors or other overheating issues. That said, when I set up a rig like this I am almost always the board op. and I am very conscious of not running both 1k loads for at full for more than a few seconds. I'm not sure I would trust that situation in a high school setting. When you lose a
channel in one of these
Leviton packs, it's just gone.
Jumping up considerably, I also have a number of the
Leviton/NSI DDS6000+ packs. These are 4
channel packs with four 1200
watt SCR driven channels per pack. It has significant toroidal chokes and is specced at a ~400us rise time (
ETC Sensor dimmers are specced at a 350us rise time) It has dual 12
awg feeder cables that must come from two separate circuits if you want to load them at full capacity. Technically speaking, these are rated for a total of 3,600 watts. However, that is a
bit of semantics that comes from the fact that since it has the 15-amp standard
edison plug, it's UL
rating can be no higher than 15-amps per
feeder circuit. If you have 20-amp
feeder circuits with
edison connectors, and any extension cables you use to get to the packs are 12
gauge or 10
gauge and relatively short (25' or less) I would see no issue loading these with 4 - 1k loads. Price for this pack is usually in the $650 range. If something goes bad
in one of these packs, it's generally worth having repaired as they are pretty robust. The University of Minnesota uses these packs for the
distributed dimming in their
arena theatre.
Next there is the Leprechon ULD-340-HP. These are very similar in performance to the
Leviton DDS series. They sell for about $850. Again, you have two 12
gauge input cords that have been down-rated to 15 amps because of the connecter used. Leprechon does not list the rise time of their chokes, but in my experience the
filament noise I hear is similar to rack mounted dimmers by the major manufacturers. The two primary advantages of the
Leprecon packs are: 1. they are designed to be tree mounted and are super easy to rig. 2. Their
SCR driven dimmers are actually rated at 25 amps each. That means that you could actually operate a 2.4k load on ONE
dimmer as long as you weren't using the other
dimmer fed by the same
feeder circuit.
Finally there is the Litetronics AS42D. These packs have basically the same features as the
Leviton DDS packs except: they are
triac driven and they have smaller chokes with a ~150us rise time. This means that they are slightly noisier and that the dimming
circuit is likely slightly less robust in response to short circuits and other
voltage spikes. They sell for just under $500. I have not used these packs personally, but they look a pretty solid
unit.
So, here is my tome about the products that I would consider to be likely candidates for your purposes.