Traditional Church House Lights to DMX?

Update. New DMX dimmers are in, and are pretty nice. I rigged them with a show/day use bypass switch, so to the daily user the system looks identical. Ended up with GE floods in the main house. More lumens overall than we had before but strange effect because they are more directed, was left with a visual "black void" that made the house seem to the eye to be dimmer. Visual field balance sort of thing. I hung 3 strings of Edison LED light strings.. 30 watts total and voila, the eye is fooled again into not feeling that void up high in the blackness of the rafters/ceiling. The GE ultra bright LED floods are pretty nice.. have an annoying little pop at the bottom, that is avoided by dropping the last 5% fast.. so will fix that with dimming curve. the GE regular bulbs (75 watt equiv?) in the balcony have a pop at the top of the curve, that is solved if I limit them to 95%. The TCP bulbs for my lower Aisle fixtures gave me a little scare.. they behaved in my balcony loop, but as predicted by some here, they dont behave consistantly in different settings. Installed in the aisle loop with longer electrical runs, they were on or off, until I put just one GE LED bulb in the loop.. Strange, but then they dim just dandy zero to full. I had to put a single 7 watt mini incandescent load in the edison string circuit for them to dim well. Bottom line for about 1200 bucks all up, I took our 500+ seat house from conventionals on mechanical manual dimmers to a pretty well behaved array of LED's on dmx dimmers. At 10 cents per KWH it was costing us probably 45 cents an hour to run the house. So payback by saving about 40 cents an hour, is within my lifetime.. Also our 200 watt conventional incandescents and the 75 conventionals are now made of unobtanium, so we wont have to scrounge in the coming years. Long path to get here.. thanks to all who chimed in. But I will miss the "red glow" The Edisons come close to mimicking.. sigh
 
Update. New DMX dimmers are in, and are pretty nice. I rigged them with a show/day use bypass switch, so to the daily user the system looks identical. Ended up with GE floods in the main house. More lumens overall than we had before but strange effect because they are more directed, was left with a visual "black void" that made the house seem to the eye to be dimmer. Visual field balance sort of thing. I hung 3 strings of Edison LED light strings.. 30 watts total and voila, the eye is fooled again into not feeling that void up high in the blackness of the rafters/ceiling. The GE ultra bright LED floods are pretty nice.. have an annoying little pop at the bottom, that is avoided by dropping the last 5% fast.. so will fix that with dimming curve. the GE regular bulbs (75 watt equiv?) in the balcony have a pop at the top of the curve, that is solved if I limit them to 95%. The TCP bulbs for my lower Aisle fixtures gave me a little scare.. they behaved in my balcony loop, but as predicted by some here, they dont behave consistantly in different settings. Installed in the aisle loop with longer electrical runs, they were on or off, until I put just one GE LED bulb in the loop.. Strange, but then they dim just dandy zero to full. I had to put a single 7 watt mini incandescent load in the edison string circuit for them to dim well. Bottom line for about 1200 bucks all up, I took our 500+ seat house from conventionals on mechanical manual dimmers to a pretty well behaved array of LED's on dmx dimmers. At 10 cents per KWH it was costing us probably 45 cents an hour to run the house. So payback by saving about 40 cents an hour, is within my lifetime.. Also our 200 watt conventional incandescents and the 75 conventionals are now made of unobtanium, so we wont have to scrounge in the coming years. Long path to get here.. thanks to all who chimed in. But I will miss the "red glow" The Edisons come close to mimicking.. sigh
How about a few photos, to include the DMX dimmers?
 
How about a few photos, to include the DMX dimmers?
OK have since cleaned up the rj45 runs/daisy chain on the dimmers. But here are dimmers and bypass switches. Old boxes above are where 2 of the 6 mechanical dimmers were.. we ran 6 connected literally with a wooden stick for 21 years.
Various angles of the house. Over 100 year old Chataqua barn.. never agriculture, (think Tent Show meetings) We have occupied the space now for 75 years. Facility seats over 500, and the big shows still sell out on the weekends. Enclosed in 2001. New shop and costume shop were built over and under on the back of the building 6 years ago.. We now have about 4000 Sq ft shop space, and 6000 sq ft Costume shop filled to the gills. We rent costumes and props regionally to other Theaters and schools. All volunteer organization.. absolutely amazing people
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Congratulations on becoming a pastor of a pentacostal church! It sounds like you are doing a great job updating the visual aspects of your sanctuary to enhance your worship experience. I can understand your excitement about adding stage lights to run through LightKey.
 
Congratulations on becoming a pastor of a pentacostal church! It sounds like you are doing a great job updating the visual aspects of your sanctuary to enhance your worship experience. I can understand your excitement about adding stage lights to run through LightKey.
Yet, I also see your concern about making your house lights DMX compatible. A more permanent and proper way to make your house lights DMX compatible would be to hardwire them. This would require running new electrical wires from your light switches to a DMX dimmer pack. I hope this information is helpful to you, and I wish you all the best in your efforts to update your church's lighting.
 
Yet, I also see your concern about making your house lights DMX compatible. A more permanent and proper way to make your house lights DMX compatible would be to hardwire them. This would require running new electrical wires from your light switches to a DMX dimmer pack. I hope this information is helpful to you, and I wish you all the best in your efforts to update your church's lighting.
The OP said he has installed DMX dimmers and I believe they are hardwired to the fixtures. The boxes next to the light switches are the DMX dimmers.
 

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