Stuart R
Member
Hello all -
It's the end of the school year and I'm trying to spend the little money remaining in my budget wisely. About half of the 60 or so lighting in our rep plot are conventionals, while the other half (including two moving lights) are LEDs. They are all powered by a typical ETC sensor 96 x 2.4k dimmer rack. I'm well aware that it is verboten to power LEDs through normal dimmers, but that's been the approach to this point (the dimmers in question are parked at 100% through our ETC Element board). I know that zillions of people do the same thing, and we seem to have gotten away with it up to this point, but I'm not comfortable with it, and am looking at our options.
I know that one can replace the normal dimmer modules with relays or with continuous power modules, and given that the latter are about half the cost of the former, the CC20s make more sense for us. I'm finding it a bit confusing, however, to figure out how many we'd need. Unlike conventionals and dimmers, where the board is instructing the dimmers to power up and down to control the intensity, with LEDs, all of the intensity adjustment happens in the instrument. When one patches several conventionals to a single dimmer, they're functionally all ganged together. With LEDs and continuous power modules, couldn't I patch a bunch of them to the same module? I might only need a few to power all 30 of our LEDs, unless I'm misunderstanding things. How would I do that math?
The other option would be to daisy-chain extension cords from LED to LED and then plug them into regular power. I've seen discussion on here about what gauge to use, and so forth. Most of our connectors are 12/3 heavy-duty, but they are quite expensive, and I suspect that running 12/3 cords around would end up costing more than the CC20 modules. [I'm also not clear what connectors to get for the daisy chaining - maybe buy each cord with a three way outlet on the end?]
So I'm leaning toward buying some CC20s but would appreciate your advice on whether that's a good approach, and how many to get.
Thank you.
It's the end of the school year and I'm trying to spend the little money remaining in my budget wisely. About half of the 60 or so lighting in our rep plot are conventionals, while the other half (including two moving lights) are LEDs. They are all powered by a typical ETC sensor 96 x 2.4k dimmer rack. I'm well aware that it is verboten to power LEDs through normal dimmers, but that's been the approach to this point (the dimmers in question are parked at 100% through our ETC Element board). I know that zillions of people do the same thing, and we seem to have gotten away with it up to this point, but I'm not comfortable with it, and am looking at our options.
I know that one can replace the normal dimmer modules with relays or with continuous power modules, and given that the latter are about half the cost of the former, the CC20s make more sense for us. I'm finding it a bit confusing, however, to figure out how many we'd need. Unlike conventionals and dimmers, where the board is instructing the dimmers to power up and down to control the intensity, with LEDs, all of the intensity adjustment happens in the instrument. When one patches several conventionals to a single dimmer, they're functionally all ganged together. With LEDs and continuous power modules, couldn't I patch a bunch of them to the same module? I might only need a few to power all 30 of our LEDs, unless I'm misunderstanding things. How would I do that math?
The other option would be to daisy-chain extension cords from LED to LED and then plug them into regular power. I've seen discussion on here about what gauge to use, and so forth. Most of our connectors are 12/3 heavy-duty, but they are quite expensive, and I suspect that running 12/3 cords around would end up costing more than the CC20 modules. [I'm also not clear what connectors to get for the daisy chaining - maybe buy each cord with a three way outlet on the end?]
So I'm leaning toward buying some CC20s but would appreciate your advice on whether that's a good approach, and how many to get.
Thank you.