Recent content by David Ashton

Pipe is measured by it's internal diameter. Tube is measured by it's outside diameter. This is a common problem which I resolved by making a clamp which fits a variety of sizes and also square tube. Very useful on country tours.

The quality of the make-up lights needs to be identical to the stage lights, LEDs tend to be weak at the red end of the spectrum so the actor will put on a redder make-up to look right, however if they then walk on stage to halogen or high CRI LED lights they tend to look like clowns.

buying theatre grade LED is simply not an option for state schools

I have been buying theatre lamps from China, they are cheap and so far reliable, with millions of halogen luminaires in the world and the cost of LEDs prohibitive for infrequent users like schools, there is a vacuum in the market which China seems happy to fill. Plus the fact that a halogen is...

I really think you would be best served to hire a competent audio guy to guide you through all this, basically this is a complex system. Youtube has many good clips on the various components but an overview of the system you need is quite complex and cannot be learned on site such as this. It's...

Every high school in W Australia has metal and wood shops and some have auto shops for all sexes

wow I was expecting a chorus of "Luddite" and other derogatory comments.

Sorry but by definition a LED has an inferior light unless there's one with a CRI of 110 I don't know about and with the amount of energy to produce leds you need to use them a lot to get a return on greenhouse emissions unless your running on renewable power in which case it's even longer. I...

I don't understand why you want to spend heaps of money to produce an inferior light, if you were running hundreds of hours then a power saving might be worth it or if you have very limited power you might need to but to get close to halogen quality light costs a serious amount of money.

Making a colour frame is pretty simple, the high school probably has a metal workshop which could make them for you, they don't need to look pretty

Could anyone tell me the practical working lifetime of Cheap Led theatre luminaires Mid market Luminaires Professional grade luminaires Considering availability of parts and general degradation, in other words over what time frame should they be depreciated?

Some years ago I asked an expert at Fluke about this question and he told me that with all the factors in multi dimming situations and D.C. content then it was not possible to be super accurate. Either he was wrong or things have changed. Now a moving iron meter is a true RMS meter AC/DC and...

Firstly I love calculus, second I get all the data on P.F., however my reservations concern the distortion of the waveform leading to non cancellation in the neutral. However this week I will set up an experiment with 3 LEDs on a 3 phase system and see what actually occurs, if it's interesting I...

OK could you link to this "active device' for my information? I totally fail to see a mechanism for an inductor to fix this problem but I would like to be enlightened, I recently had a case of an harmonic filter, a very clever device which completely stuffed up the dimmers it was supplying. Why...

Power factor is not the issue, the issue is that switch mode supplies tend to draw more current at the peak of the waveform and this will lead to higher neutral currents, so has anyone with a large LED rig actually measured it.