I own about 100 or so moving lights and I am a full time repair tech. I strongly recomend renting them if you are only going to use them about 10 or so times a year. I cannot tell you how many times i have seen moving lights quit working just because they have sat too long. The motors freeze up typically, and the gears dont mesh correctly. Usually a few motors seaze up, and motors run about 30 bucks a piece. Recently at a school, a studio beam lamp
power supply went out, it was 500 bucks to get the
power supply repaired on top of 130 for a new ignitor, the
power supply took out the ignitor. I just had a lamp
power supply go out
in one of my studio beams, and the shop called and said it was unrepairable, so highend kindly offered to sell me a new
power supply for 1400 bucks. For 1400 bucks i can almost buy a used studio beam. Another example, is a club dropped off a
martin MX-1 (250watt moving mirror) that kept blowing the
fuse. Turns out the
transformer had gone bad on the primary side.
Transformer runs you around 200 bucks, and hopefully it did not take out the logic board, which is somewhat common when a
transformer does go bad. Logic boards for moving lights run around 200-600 and up depending on the manufactuer. The logic board "set" for my
clay paky stage zooms, its a set of three logic boards that control the light, run about 6000 for the set. The
EPROM chip runs about 500, and they do go bad, along with the fans which run you about 150 a piece. The latest bill was repairing 8 x-spots with varing amounts of problems (wiring harness, old
yoke design problems,
power supply problems) ran about 5000 bucks. Last repair done on a studio spot was 1300, for a new lamp
power supply. Lamps run around 100-200, lamp for our xenon moving head runs about 1000. (for those of you who are interested in the highend systems DL series, expect to pay about 1000 a lamp)