Dimmable "floods"

jds10011

Member
A local space has some off-the-shelf 500W halogen flood fixtures (basically the architectural version of the cheap portable worklight) as their only house lights. These fixtures are obviously horribly energy inefficient, burn out constantly, and even have sockets that regularly fail when run 24/7. For worklight purposes, I would immediately replace with LED, but they use these on a dimmer for house lights (although they are often on 24/7). Certainly, they could get different fixtures for "show" and "not show" purposes, but obviously this would require hiring an electrician and adding new wiring (and of course budgets are tight). I see very little in the way of dimmable LED flood fixtures on the market, and none from any reputable manufacturer (at least none that I've heard of), and most anything else seems to be a much narrower beam in comparison to the existing fixtures. Potentially DMX could be added to these locations with less expense, but would still be a little tough for them (and also most of these fixtures seem either pricy or not likely to be designed to run 24/7 for years). Does anyone have fixture recommendations for this application? (Again, the preference is for something directly dimmable, but if it's a DMX fixture, the cost shouldn't be too outrageous and it should be ok to run 24/7).
 
There are severalf good choices for dimmable LED houselight-type fixtures with DMX that can operate 24/7.
Unfortunately there are no cheap ones; a case of you get what you pay for.
I've used the Altman Chalice and the Light Source HL series and they check all the boxes, but they are around $1200-$1500 per fixture.
 
Out Theater Dept. TD loves Amazon, found these, bought about 20, dirt cheap.

We threw them up as worklights in a new facility, had 2-4 on Sensor dimmers which we ran at about 15% at night as ghost lights. Generally they all held up remarkably well, I think we've had failures on 4 or 5 and mostly just array failures, so less light output. They are not UL listed, but at this price you can buy a boatload and never worry about a warranty.

 
The question is how good does the dimming have to be? The cheap option won't dim all the way to zero, or there might be some flickering and blinking on the way out. Part of the reason the Altman's cost what they do is they are designed to dim better without running DMX to every one of them.
 
For a small Theatre I used these



They have a power circuit and a 0-10V circuit. I made a fixture profile for them in the Nomad software. One channel was dimming (I used an old Leprecon 0-10V analog to dmx converter we had around) and the other (connected to a dmx relay) shut off the light at 15%. It took some playing with but it worked pretty well. The fixtures are well made and come with a warranty. We used a dpdt switch by the panel to switch between show mode and classroom mode. One side of the switch was 120V for the lights the other was the dimming. We used 3 way switched designed for dimming led's with a purple wire to dim when in classroom mode and dmx to dim in theatre. We expirenced 2 problems. First, if you switched to theatre when the console was not powered up the space went dark. Second sometimes the switch would be left in the center position allowing no control of the lights at all. It was workable for us because the panel was in a limited access area and one of the end of evening check list items for the show was always to restore classroom control.

I think there are several LED fixtures that use 0-10V analog control for dimming this method would probably work for most of them. I just liked these because they were easy to hang on the grid in the blackbox. The CRI on them was meh but that isn't an issue for me in classroom or houselight situations.
 
Must say I'd hate that colour temp for house lights. Very harsh. We have some workers that colour and they are much bluer and harsher than the LED arc system downlighters we have for the house lights.
 
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As I mentioned they were a price conscious option. The CRI is miserable. If color temp is all you care about they have a bluer tone fixture but the CRI is still in the 80's. The method should work for any 0-10v analog dimmed LED though.
 
The workers we have are too blue to start with. The arc system are much more pleasant to be under, much more like incandesent fixtures, and they fade almost like them too.
 
I have been really wanting to see the TMB Clone in person, it looks really beautiful! Maybe it could be a good replacement for you
 

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