I am blown away by the amazing expert advice there - thank-you so much!
So, for now, I am going to have a kid facetime the show from the wings and control the dimmers - good advice. The show is in a month, and that that is the most viable option for now. I have looked in all the storage spaces and I am pretty sure that the original control
console is long gone. This is middle school, so no one is expecting Broadway here.
Moving forward, I will look at replacing with
LED's, which we may be able to budget in stages over the next 5 years, with some fundraising.
However, my husband, (who is also an avionics technician and a general contractor) feels pretty confident that he can go into the wall and into the 20amp board behind the control
unit and find a positive and negative lead for each of the lighting tracks. He says that he can connect those to a new
circuit breaker, then put a 3-prong
plug on each of those lines (or 4 of them) and then
plug them into a
dimmer pack, and the lights can then be run to a
dmx board. I am sure there is more to it, but that is what I understand to be the basics. Worst case scenario here is this doesn't work at all, we trash the whole thing, cap it off and I rent
LED's for the next few shows until we can buy some.
I am renting
wash lights for my show this year, to highlight our new
muslin backdrop, and because I was told by one of our techs that the mic jacks were actually lighting jacks, we purchased an inexpensive lighting
console. I can use this moving forward though, so we may as well keep it.
To answer
@RonHebbard:
-The colour knobs do not need to be pulled out - they slide up and down easily
-I am in Winnipeg, so your knowledge of Western Canada installations is very helpful
-Thank-you for taking the time to type and provide your expertise
Sincerely,
Dawn