House Lights to Full

Edrick

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
Alright as said in another post of mine we reset the entire dimmer system to try and fix two problems. one was a faulty backstage pannel, which may have just been the leviton breaker pannel. but either way we reset the dimmer rack also for the house light issue.

for some unknown reason when the system is on everything will go to full, houselights will be dimmed and then bam! house to full, and sometimes randomly it turns everything on. any ideas on what could be causing this? it could be a faulty structural control for the lighting as the lights that come on are preset controlable via the pannels, but it also could be the lighting board which has been completely reset.
 
I say it is the crazy electricans that did the lighting. But oh well what do you get when the City and State makes a new HS. Well it was doing it repeatly after you left. It came up about 3 time in 1 hr.
 
My high school has a similar problem. I attribute it to ****ingoldauditorium syndrome.
 
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well i don't think our theater has a case of ****ingoldauditorium syndrome as it was just built :p
 
Wow that is an odd one. i'm racking my brain, typically an issue with things suddenly slamming on and off tends to be issues with control modules, when talking about architectual lighting systems. I don't think you could attribute this particular issue to DMX noise or faulty cabling as that will typically result in a single channel flickering or a whole part of a rack acting wonky. Does this happen when the system is in show mode? or only when it's in a default "house lights on mode" ? If possible you miht try un patching the House lights from the architectual system and try running the from you board, if then issue disappears then I'd say definatly a control system failure. either something arcing or shorting causing this anomylous behaviour. I think I read in an earlier post that you had a control modual failure somewhere ? was it on stage of house control system ?
 
Wow that is an odd one. i'm racking my brain, typically an issue with things suddenly slamming on and off tends to be issues with control modules, when talking about architectual lighting systems. I don't think you could attribute this particular issue to DMX noise or faulty cabling as that will typically result in a single channel flickering or a whole part of a rack acting wonky. Does this happen when the system is in show mode? or only when it's in a default "house lights on mode" ? If possible you miht try un patching the House lights from the architectual system and try running the from you board, if then issue disappears then I'd say definatly a control system failure. either something arcing or shorting causing this anomylous behaviour. I think I read in an earlier post that you had a control modual failure somewhere ? was it on stage of house control system ?
Let me see if i can answer some of your quetions van.
The lights go from dim to full when in house mode and in show mode. There was a show a few days ago and the r-40's on the stage went on. And then all week the house lights have gone from dim to full but this when the board was on. Also the lights have gone from zero to full when the board and the control panel was off.
And yes, there has been a module failure with the system. Yet the reset didnt fix that as you might think might happen. The building manager told us that the module failure is on the house lights. But knowing him, i dont know if he knows 100% that it is on the house lights.
 
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I believe you guys said there's a Barbizon not far away right? Give them a call. I don't think there's a quick fix. Sounds like a botched install job or bad gear. Either way its something that needs some professional attention.
 
I back Gaff 100% on this. This sounds like a botched install. I know of one install that I worked on when I was working for Rosco ET where the local low voltage contractor had attached the drain wire from the Belden DMX cable to the ground pin of the DMX. This would result in a build up and periodic discharge of static / emf pulses through the system. It took me forever to figure out the problem and them a lot longer to fix as they had to go back and rewire every panel in the Vista system. Call the Barbizon place. Or go back to the Contractors/installers and ask them to fix it. That's a bad problem.:!:
 
another note is that this recently started happening last week, it hadn't happened at all before that. So perhapse it is the moduel error, but he just looked at it like it was nothing. I'll have to bring it upto him again. the moduel is on our house system as the leviton structural control so maybe it's just that one moduel that's causing the whole house system to come on.
 
Seems like there should be some sort of warranty on such a new system that would get you some free repair. Or at least a service call from the guys who put it in. What a sad situation. Again the need for a staff member T.D. rares it's head. It's ridiculous that a student has to beg and coerce someone to care that the house lights weren't installed correctly or are broken already. There should be a paid staff member who's job it is to care about that problem and see that it gets fixed. Typical example of spending the money for a building but not caring what happens to it afterward.
 
I try my best for what i can do. You're right there should be someone that's paid that does this and isn't treated as a student. But as there is no one to do that, I'm better than nothing and atleast bring the matters up and do my best to get this stuff fixed. It's better than just allowing janitors to go in and run the place. I do what I can. I'm going to bring this up to him again, and the fact that we still haven't seen the sound company.

We have a case of the building manager not caring about the theater and taking his time to get to stuff. It's as simple as him calling them but will he? Probably not.
 
If the theatre has Hardwired DMX to the dimmers, check that everything was wired correctly. We had a new lighting system put in a couple years ago were the electrician that did the install mixed up 2 wires at the wall outlet by the board. This caused the lights to have an occassional flicker that we attributed to our resident ghost. It took almost a year to figure out exactly what was causing the problem.

Now if we could just figure out why circuits on the Patch panel unplug themselves...
 
oh we've allready attributed this to a ghost.
 

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