Running your entire rig at full

[mnfreelancer]

In my highschool theatre (1000 seat with about 180 or so strand SL's) we were in the usual constant fight with band/choir/orchestra instructors who didn't bother to learn how to operate the console, let alone the architectual control system. They insisted on having a fader on the arch. system that brought everything up to full. They'd use this for rehersals and just leave the rig on for hours and hours with nobody around. Caused a lot of excessive re-lamping plus the ceramics in those fixtures didn't last long.

On the flip side, however, we used everything at full to our advantage occasionally during paint calls, especially when the deck was being painted. Even though the SL is an efficient fixture that deck dried much faster with 180 575's pointed at it!

 

[Diarmuid]

There are 2 reasons I do the full on;
1. So I can see what isn't working that needs to go on the electrician's to do list(granted that may be me as well, but I know it is a physical problem-- putting everything at full takes patch, programming and console settings out of the equation). This I could accomplish by bringing the dimmers up a few at a time and therefore avoiding the inrush current.

Surely if you just ran the lights up to 15% or some simmilar figure, you wouldn't be pulling as huge an amount of power, and then you can just pop down to stage and check that its all good. Also you don't get quite as much retina burn or the hassle of having to go 1 thru 5 at full, 6 thru 10 at full etc.

...

Had we not been running everything at full during the time, we might not have found out about the problem until the event was already happening. Especially since an over-loaded breaker can take minutes to trip.

Admittedly it was lucky in this case, as it allowed you to find out about the misinformation you got. However as far as theatre is concerned, once you've done X amount of dress rehearsals, all of the power demands of the show should have been rehearsed repeatedly along with everything else, surely this means you can be able to be pretty confident about any power supply problems you might meet during your show and so shouldn't have any need to run at full to check (unless of course your show demands all lights/equipment at full). Also for what its worth, I do understand that that wasn't a theatre situation, i was just saying for all the theatre people out there.

 

[cdub260]

On my main stage, if I were to run every piece of lighting and effect equipment in my inventory at 100%, I would still only be able to pull 65% of the de-rated capacity of my lighting system's 3 phase service.

I have never encountered any situation in which I would have all of that equipment in service at the same time, never mind one which would require me to have it all powered up at the same time. The typical load on my 600 amp service when the I have a show running is 20-50 amps distributed across all three legs. I imagine more conventional stage shows would have greater power usage, but the point is that you will rarely see a power feed for a stage lighting system pushed to its limits.