dbn, What type of dimmers do you have? Most (well, basically all dimmers now a days) work by turning on and off the
power 120 times a second, NOT by limiting the
voltage. When your fixtures are on at 80% the lamp sees whatever your
voltage may be 80% as often as if it were on full.
As for the original post, my one suggestion would be to create a warmup
cue or sub that you run before any show. Manually or otherwise SLOWLY turn on all the fixtures in the theater to about 25% or 35% for 30 seconds or so, then SLOWLY turn them off. This will slowly warm up all the lamps, so that they don't get immediately turned on with the first
cue in the show. Lamps more often fail right as their being turned on, not after hours and hours of use.
On an
ETC Express, you can create a warmup sub simply:
Code:
[Channel] [1] [thru] [last channel number] [at] [30] [record] [sub] [press bump button on desired sub] [time] [15] [30][10] [enter]
What that does is let you hit the
bump button on the lighting
console. Walk downstairs, visually inspect that every lamp is working, and then the
console turns all the lights off its self. There are many similar ways to accomplish this, that is my way.
That should help. Other then that you may be wanting to
call an electrician and see what he thinks of
power on the mains.
Having said that, lamps fail. If you put the lamps in at around the same time, or you flash the lamps a lot (chases kill lamps), don't be surprised that they die. I've seen people
play with the bump buttons just for fun, while no one was in the theater, and wonder why the lamp suddenly died. Bump on and bump outs have a similar
effect.
Good luck,
Zac Spitzer