Shoddy school construction

[Sayen]

I just had the chance to visit another school in my district, unofficially as a crew member for a rental. I'm not sure anyone there even knew I worked for the district.

Older building, and their dimmers apparently failed. The district electricians chose to buy an ETC Sensor system in a roadcase from a rental company, and wired it in 'permanently.' First, the installation involves a box on wheels and cables from the system running across a hallway, with the DMX line run along the wall out to the booth. No trip hazard there. Second bit of genius was the electrician's choice of circuits. As near as I could tell they just gave it their best guess where power needed to go, with only fifty dimmers (and it looks like only power for half) available. That's three up in FOH, six or seven over the stage, a couple of random floor pockets, etc...

I was glad I was there for scenery, and not lighting.

 

[GrayeKnight]

None of our floor pockets work, because 1) theres so much dust in them and 2) the ones i've cleaned out don't have dimmer modules to power them because 1/4 of ours are broken. If we want to use the floor pockets we have to pull a module that would be powering either an electric or something on our catwalk. Or just drop cable from an electric. However.. With 42 circuts overall thats not something i like doing..

 

[tjrobb]

Graye - The strangest floor pockets I have found were discovered post-flood when we were removing the damaged deck. We had 3 or 4 pockets already, we found 4 more... and all four had 2 stage plug (not pin) connectors in them, likely from when the theatre was built in 1928.

 

[billn]

> 1) GHSStageManager, unless it's a very small auditorium, the wall switch does not actually switch the power for the houselights. More likely it controls one or more contactors, so it would be possible, for a qualified, licensed electrician with knowledge of relay circuit wiring, to install an alternate control location. Operating the On-Off functionality from your stage lighting control system would not be cost-effective however.

Not necessarily. It would not be hard to have that wall switch control the power to a small dimmer rack. The light board could then control the dimmers. The only real caveat is that both the wall switch and the light board would need to be active for the house lights to work.

To get around this problem, you can use dimmers that default to full on when DMX is not present, then use an inhibitive submaster to control the house lights. There are four possible states to examine here:

1: switch off and board off - no house lights
2: switch on and board off - house lights on full
3: switch off and board on - no house lights
4: switch on and board on - board has control of house light levels

 

[CSCTech]

Ah yes... one of the things I hate about my theatre..

At our theatre, house lights are controlled by 7 dimmers. 7. I'm since soft-patched them so they only are controlled by channel 48 (we have an express 24/48), but that still doesn't give us back the 6 dimmers which could be used for something more productive.

Haha, try 14 dimmers being used for house
Plus 12 of our dimmers arent hooked up, one leads to no where, ones broken, and one is a spacer.

 

[Morpheus]

Haha, try 14 dimmers being used for house
Plus 12 of our dimmers arent hooked up, one leads to no where, ones broken, and one is a spacer.

is it a reall dimmer then, or an AFM (?) Air Flow Module (installed in racks to help channel air alog the other dimmers.


Also, the reason why house sometime 'appear' to take up more dimmers than they need:
Wattage.
EACH DIMMER CAN ONLY HANDLE 2.4K WATTS (standard ETC dimmers anyway. [yes, there are larger, i know, but they take up 2 or more rack spaces]), BUT THE TOTAL STILL DEPENDS ON SYSTEM WIRING.
So, if you run 300 watt lamps, with a 15 amp circut... 15ampsx120volts= 1800 wats max (for that circut)... 1800/300 = 6 lamps. with 120 watt lamps (1800/120) = 15 lamps... HOWEVER, it is possible that at some point further down, the amp rating might drop again (not sure why it would, but yea. I would double check)...

So, anyway, yea... house lights (usually) HAVE to be on more than one dimmer, it's not just to piss off people


(disclaimer: all math is off the top of my head, feel free to correct)

 

[MarshallPope]

Off topic, but this made me wonder -
Has anyone with nice, neat individually dimmed rows of house lights ever gone House Out with a wave from the stage to the back? Might be distracting, but I bet it would look pretty darn cool.

 

[Morpheus]

Off topic, but this made me wonder -
Has anyone with nice, neat individually dimmed rows of house lights ever gone House Out with a wave from the stage to the back? Might be distracting, but I bet it would look pretty darn cool.

Sort of, my high school was wired like this...
But we didn't know much back then, so who knows if we effectively used it

 

[masterelectrician2112]

Our houselights don't dim but they can be controlled either from architectural controllers or from our expression 48/96. The wiring is very crazy though. I thought they could have at least wired them in zones that make sense. When I get back there, I'll try to post a diagram of the patch. It is quite interesting and makes half-house a nightmare to program.

 

[zmb]

My school (the one with the best drama department of five others in my district) doesn't have a theater so for almost everything we use theater in the nearest school. The theater was a renovation in an existing building that has no lobby, no dressing/make up rooms, no wing space, uses 5 portable dimmers with 4 600w outlets each and 20a twist-lock connections, a sound board in a booth a reinforced (mesh inside the glass) and unopenable window that is also too high to see all of stage from for lighting.

Anyways, the main users of the space have repeated tried to use 750w lamps on the 600w dimmer and have abused the dimmers to the point that the fuse holders snapped off the circuit board inside the case.

 

[Burgeonite]

These stories make me so happy to have a good theatre.(except for the fly rail)

 

[Parker]

These stories make me so happy to have a good theatre.(except for the fly rail)

...at least you have a fly rail