Bradley Taylor
Member
Hey guys,
I've been struggling with this issue for over a year now, so I thought I'd send it out. This is a problem we have been having at the high school I've been working with for about 2 years, and it got bad last year. I'm now in college for lighting and have come back to try and help figure out what is happening…again.
The problem is that dimmers will fail to come on, and/or come one when they are not supposed to in a flicker-y manner, or come on but flicker and not come to full power. So, sometimes when you bring up a cue dimmers will not come on, sometimes when you are setting in a cue dimmers will get brighter, or dimmers that should not be on will come on.
We are using an ETC Expression 3 lighting console. It has worked fine for a school that really doesn't do much with moving lights. When I got here a few day ago the board started acting up. It does not allow us to run a dimmer check; the "dimmer check" box pops up for half a second and goes away. Every time I used to command "Group" "1" "at" "Full" "enter" it would bump the lights up to 18% intensity, same thing when doing channel. The only way to get it to go to full was to use the scrollers. Also, today while I was watching the screen random channels were going from 0 to 100 and just bouncing all over the place and we would loose control of the board, the only thing to do was to turn the board off…while it was doing this non of the actual fixtures were coming on.
This is a brand new 20 million dollar auditorium that opened in 2008, I feel like it is way to early to be having these kind of issues.
Here is the system:
3 48 module Sensor+ 230V Installation Racks (HSR),
So far we have:
-swapped out the dimmers themselves, new dimmers work
-Replaced all modules that went out with new ones last year, this year even more have gone out including a few of the new one.
-cleaned all the dirt and crap out of the dimmer cards and brains
Things we know:
The problems are not confined to 1 rack
problems are not confined to 1 phase
problems seem to get worse as the day goes on (I'm thinking temperature issues)
when i took the cards out to clean them a few seemed warmer than i would have expected
In one instance there are 4 dimmers patched to the same channel, of which only 2 are affected.
When a module goes out it is for good and has to be replaced.
phases are reasonably balanced
We have spoke to ETC and they do not have much to say.
Thanks everybody!
Brad
I've been struggling with this issue for over a year now, so I thought I'd send it out. This is a problem we have been having at the high school I've been working with for about 2 years, and it got bad last year. I'm now in college for lighting and have come back to try and help figure out what is happening…again.
The problem is that dimmers will fail to come on, and/or come one when they are not supposed to in a flicker-y manner, or come on but flicker and not come to full power. So, sometimes when you bring up a cue dimmers will not come on, sometimes when you are setting in a cue dimmers will get brighter, or dimmers that should not be on will come on.
We are using an ETC Expression 3 lighting console. It has worked fine for a school that really doesn't do much with moving lights. When I got here a few day ago the board started acting up. It does not allow us to run a dimmer check; the "dimmer check" box pops up for half a second and goes away. Every time I used to command "Group" "1" "at" "Full" "enter" it would bump the lights up to 18% intensity, same thing when doing channel. The only way to get it to go to full was to use the scrollers. Also, today while I was watching the screen random channels were going from 0 to 100 and just bouncing all over the place and we would loose control of the board, the only thing to do was to turn the board off…while it was doing this non of the actual fixtures were coming on.
This is a brand new 20 million dollar auditorium that opened in 2008, I feel like it is way to early to be having these kind of issues.
Here is the system:
3 48 module Sensor+ 230V Installation Racks (HSR),
So far we have:
-swapped out the dimmers themselves, new dimmers work
-Replaced all modules that went out with new ones last year, this year even more have gone out including a few of the new one.
-cleaned all the dirt and crap out of the dimmer cards and brains
Things we know:
The problems are not confined to 1 rack
problems are not confined to 1 phase
problems seem to get worse as the day goes on (I'm thinking temperature issues)
when i took the cards out to clean them a few seemed warmer than i would have expected
In one instance there are 4 dimmers patched to the same channel, of which only 2 are affected.
When a module goes out it is for good and has to be replaced.
phases are reasonably balanced
We have spoke to ETC and they do not have much to say.
Thanks everybody!
Brad