I'm working on bringing an old school auditorium closer to the 21st century. I may have a number of these posts in the coming months, so bear with me!
The current system is a Major Equipment Company install from 1964. There is a big Frankenstein board stage right rated at 200 Amps that contains about 60 breakers for stage lights, work lights, house lights, stage and auditorium outlets (which feed the sound system), as well as dressing rooms and a custodian closet. Currently only 1 of the 9 Luxtrol autotransformer dimmers work. The rest of the lights are all on or off. The power input as far as I can tell is three-phase with a neutral. The grounding bar has both a chassis ground and connection to the neutral (not sure exactly how it all works).
We very much need all the space we can get back stage. I was considering trying to get the old board removed and replacing it all with a service panel (and possibly splitting the dressing room and custodian closet lights to a sub panel) and then running distributed dimmers to the lights. As you can tell from above, I know enough to know to get someone else to do that part. Luckily I'm on good speaking terms with our HVAC guy who knows how to tangle with three-phase. The circuit breakers are all balanced across the three phases so each is basically one-phase; lucky for me, whoever installed it color-coded all the breakers.
Currently, we have 9 ellipsoidals in the beam position, which are located in the attic above the acoustical panel. (Eight are Major Equipment; one is a slightly newer Altman ERS, but we hardly use it - it seems much dimmer with the same 750 W bulb in the other fixtures). They utilize Twist-Lock plugs. We recently acquired some second-hand dimmer packs from a closed concert venue. I was planning on using one Leprecon ULD-360 for every three lights (two on one circuit, and one on the other, since each of these packs has two circuits which max out at 1800 W). We would need to replace the current plug boxes with Edison plugs, and then have Edison-to-Twist-Lock adapters to go from the DP to the instruments.
Also, over the stage, we have three rows of Altman Borderlight 528s over the stage. Each row has between 48 and 50 bulbs of unknown wattage. I do have some DPs I could use for them, but I would not be able to use all the lights - too much for the DPs I have (4x MD412-48 DMX, 1200 W / channel).
In the deal we got from that closed concert venue, we also acquired about 40 PAR Cans - I think they're mostly PAR64s, although I haven't gotten a close look at more than 10 of them. I had considered trying to get a handful of those rigged over the stage to use for color washes. It would be eighteen in three rows - two with red gels, two with blue gels, and two white or with amber gels on each row. That reflects the lighting options we're apt to see at our One-Act Play contests.
This is part of a large-scale plan to slowly move forward. The goal is to phase out these old instruments and move to safer and more efficient ones.
The current system is a Major Equipment Company install from 1964. There is a big Frankenstein board stage right rated at 200 Amps that contains about 60 breakers for stage lights, work lights, house lights, stage and auditorium outlets (which feed the sound system), as well as dressing rooms and a custodian closet. Currently only 1 of the 9 Luxtrol autotransformer dimmers work. The rest of the lights are all on or off. The power input as far as I can tell is three-phase with a neutral. The grounding bar has both a chassis ground and connection to the neutral (not sure exactly how it all works).
We very much need all the space we can get back stage. I was considering trying to get the old board removed and replacing it all with a service panel (and possibly splitting the dressing room and custodian closet lights to a sub panel) and then running distributed dimmers to the lights. As you can tell from above, I know enough to know to get someone else to do that part. Luckily I'm on good speaking terms with our HVAC guy who knows how to tangle with three-phase. The circuit breakers are all balanced across the three phases so each is basically one-phase; lucky for me, whoever installed it color-coded all the breakers.
Currently, we have 9 ellipsoidals in the beam position, which are located in the attic above the acoustical panel. (Eight are Major Equipment; one is a slightly newer Altman ERS, but we hardly use it - it seems much dimmer with the same 750 W bulb in the other fixtures). They utilize Twist-Lock plugs. We recently acquired some second-hand dimmer packs from a closed concert venue. I was planning on using one Leprecon ULD-360 for every three lights (two on one circuit, and one on the other, since each of these packs has two circuits which max out at 1800 W). We would need to replace the current plug boxes with Edison plugs, and then have Edison-to-Twist-Lock adapters to go from the DP to the instruments.
Also, over the stage, we have three rows of Altman Borderlight 528s over the stage. Each row has between 48 and 50 bulbs of unknown wattage. I do have some DPs I could use for them, but I would not be able to use all the lights - too much for the DPs I have (4x MD412-48 DMX, 1200 W / channel).
In the deal we got from that closed concert venue, we also acquired about 40 PAR Cans - I think they're mostly PAR64s, although I haven't gotten a close look at more than 10 of them. I had considered trying to get a handful of those rigged over the stage to use for color washes. It would be eighteen in three rows - two with red gels, two with blue gels, and two white or with amber gels on each row. That reflects the lighting options we're apt to see at our One-Act Play contests.
This is part of a large-scale plan to slowly move forward. The goal is to phase out these old instruments and move to safer and more efficient ones.
