So I know this is a topic that has a few threads devoted to it, but I thought I'd share a recent experience. Being a public high school, we were dark for the past few couple weeks. Midway through the break I got a call from a teacher I work with who happened to be walking by the theatre and noticed that lights were on. Long story short, the arch controller had frozen and locked every dimmer on at full. Judging by the decay of our cyc gels and the temperature of the building, lights had to have been burning for some time.
I've shut down the dimmers for extended breaks before, but I was hesitant this time since we've had trouble from recent lightning damage and they're 20 years old- I'm almost afraid they won't power back on after 2 weeks. However, it never occurred to me that they would fail in this way.
We've had this occur before when plugging in a new lighting console (which was weird), but it hasn't happened recently and certainly never on its own before. I replaced the 7517 chip on the arch controller (It's an ETC DAS) and managed to get some functionality back. The stations were locked and doing the communication error blink, leading me to believe it had a part to play in the problem. The weird part is that there weren't any storms that would have preceded this failure, I don't know why it decided to do this.
Anyway, good lesson for powering down everything during long dark periods.
I've shut down the dimmers for extended breaks before, but I was hesitant this time since we've had trouble from recent lightning damage and they're 20 years old- I'm almost afraid they won't power back on after 2 weeks. However, it never occurred to me that they would fail in this way.
We've had this occur before when plugging in a new lighting console (which was weird), but it hasn't happened recently and certainly never on its own before. I replaced the 7517 chip on the arch controller (It's an ETC DAS) and managed to get some functionality back. The stations were locked and doing the communication error blink, leading me to believe it had a part to play in the problem. The weird part is that there weren't any storms that would have preceded this failure, I don't know why it decided to do this.
Anyway, good lesson for powering down everything during long dark periods.