Control/Dimming Duplicating/repeating circuits in a raceway

[porkchop]

Just pay for dimmers.

I got to argue with you there Charc, if you know you need to design for 24 circuits at FOH but you have 40 plugs controllable through a patch bay thats as many as 16 two-fers that you have available that you don't have to drag up there as physical cable, or even own for that matter.

Brad Paisley used to (might still but I doubt it) use a patch bay system for gear they rented locally. It made it so they could have the football team hang the lights and do any necessary cabling. They only needed one person (me) that knew what was going on. With a sheet of paper in hand I just did the hard patch like they wanted and the show was instantly circuited. Any errors that had been made were quickly and easily fixed at the patch bay. It worked really slick. More dimmers would be better but in a situation were that's not gonna happen a patch bay can give you a good bit more locational flexibility.

 

[SerraAva]

Feel your pain Footer. Working in a new space which everything is two-fered or quad-fered. The two worst are probably out in the house, which HR Side Boom goes from US to DS 1-6, then up into the FoH which goes 1-24 and1-24 again, then down into the HL side boom which goes 6-1 US to DS. So house circuiting looks like this:
1-2-3-4-5-6-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9, etc, 23-24-1-2-3-4, etc, 1-2-3-4-5-6.

The 5th electric is a cyc electric with only 4 dimmers for the whole electric, 2.4k a piece. They also only put 4 drops on them for an arch that is 40' wide...

As for floor pockets, they over lap with the 2nd and 3rd electrics, so those 12 dimmers are quad circuits. The one nice thing they did was put work light circuits up. They start where the cyc lights end and there are 4 evenly spaced on the 1st (dimmer 79) and 3rd (dimmer 80) and well as off stage left (dimmer 81) and off stage right (dimmer 82).

All the electrics besides the 5th all mirror and two-fer the circuits. The best though has to be the house lights. They are all Source Four ParNels, which are ganged together with no rhyme or reason. It looks like they just ran the wires back to the dimmer room and tied them to whatever dimmer. For example, dimmer 83 brings up the HL most light, closest to the stage, a light, in the center of the house, and a light in the middle of the back of the house HR. Then some bring up 3, some 4, some 2, it is house light roulette. All the house light dimmers are like that.

The room makes my head hurt, .

 

[derekleffew]

I got to argue with you there Charc, if you know you need to design for 24 circuits at FOH but you have 40 plugs controllable through a patch bay, that's as many as 16 two-fers that you have available that you don't have to drag up there as physical cable, or even own for that matter. ...

(Apologies to Mr. Paisley. See him tomorrow night, 11/12/08, on ABC for the CMA Awards.) Um, wouldn't the need for the twofers just move to wherever the patch panel was located? As has been stated here before, the NEC requires that all permanent building branch circuits be protected by an OPD. The added costs of breakers and labor outweigh the cost of additional dimmers. Thus, in almost every instance, installed Patch Panels make no economic sense, hence their extinction. Patch bays in portable dimmer racks are an entirely different matter.

...The best though has to be the house lights. They are all Source Four ParNels, which are ganged together with no rhyme or reason. It looks like they just ran the wires back to the dimmer room and tied them to whatever dimmer. For example, dimmer 83 brings up the HL most light, closest to the stage, a light, in the center of the house, and a light in the middle of the back of the house HR. Then some bring up 3, some 4, some 2, it is house light roulette. All the house light dimmers are like that. ...

I suspect you'll find many installations where the House Lights are seemingly randomly circuited, specifically so that a failure does not plunge an entire section into darkness. Also, It's rare that wires are home run from the sockets all the way back to the dimmer racks, as that would be a waste of copper. Chances are there's a junction/terminal box where the circuits are ganged.

 

[plastical]

What you really want is to have fan-outs on the end of your raceways that you connect into "patch board" style panels of circuits, thus allowing you to mix-match between channel / circuit / outlet. It's all about control!

 

[SerraAva]

Sorry derekleffew, but like I said, ran back to the dimmer room. Been crawling around in the ceiling replacing house lights already since they put standard life lamps in them instead of long life .

It is also the first time I have worked in at theatre which the house lights are random like that, seems like a waste of cable then (it is not a small house, 1200 seat theatre, no balcony). Places I have been in normally have a high enough ceiling to where losing a bank of 3 or 4 doesn't create a dark area or in the smaller ceiling rooms, there are enough to where losing a bank again does nothing.

When they are in sequence, makes it easier to control them then as well. For example, if I am running lights in the house, I like to keep the house lights above me off unless an emergency pops up. There are also a couple of house which I work in where we have rules against the house lights going below a certain percentage. I am allowed however to black out those along the edge of the stage so blackouts aren't effected. There are also instances in which we close of parts of another theatre (balcony and under balcony, both actually have curtains in house to block them off) in which I black out those lights, again unless an emergency arises.

 

[porkchop]

As has been stated here before, the NEC requires that all permanent building branch circuits be protected by an OPD. The added costs of breakers and labor outweigh the cost of additional dimmers. Thus, in almost every instance, installed Patch Panels make no economic sense, hence their extinction. Patch bays in portable dimmer racks are an entirely different matter.

Zing.... You win Derek. I was thinking of portable racks where all it takes is a foot or so long piece of something like 12 gauge (been a while since the Paisley concert) wire to make wire runs act like they're two-ferd. Back to the buying more dimmers idea.