If you have 100A/3ph going to your
company switch, then you take that 100A/3ph to your
dimmer rack, you wouldn't want to leave
power to the
switch because if it ever did get used, it'd suck up the
power alloted for it in tandem with the
dimmer rack and would toss your
circuit breaker.
I know my electrician would not be crazy about the idea of having two
power hungry devices capable of sucking up 100A/3ph to be on the same 100A/3ph panel/
circuit/
disconnect/what-have-you.
Thanks to
load diversity, the sum of the
current ratings for the
circuit breakers in a panel can exceed the main
breaker for the panel, but if there's a strong likelihood that you'll exceed that main
breaker's
rating, then you should move some loads off of that panel. Plus if they
never plan to use that
switch, then they can sell it for at least a few dollars but still use the available
power for something else.
Company switches, while nice to have, would
never get used in a lot of community theatres if they had them. Many of them don't need 100A or 200A feeds additional to the feed to the
dimmer rack (if they even use a
dimmer rack -- many get by on
shoebox dimmers)-- what they want are more distributed 20A circuits. The prospect of being able to hire in a band is a great, but there's no band in the world traveling with gear needing to
tie-in for a couple hundred amps of
power that you could stand to make a profit off of when only selling 50 seats. If you could sell 300 tickets a gig, then you could actually stand to make a profit, but at 50 tickets to make any money you'd have to either charge a lot for tickets and then maybe break even, or get the band to
play for free. Any band willing to
play for free or that cheap isn't going to
roll in with 200A of gear; they'll
roll in with a few guitar amps and a couple 20A circuits worth of PA.
