I've been where you are. I work with a high school theater troupe who's
auditorium was very old and under 'technicalized". 2 electrical batons for the
stage and a 3rd for the back wall
wash. Plus portholes above the
house. They had 6" fresnels @ 300w each on the 2 batons & 18" scoops on the 3rd for back wall
wash. Trying to add more than 1 color on the
stage was impossible. I came across an eBay deal for buy 1 get 1 free of the Chinese
LED Par's but what got me was 9 LEDs @ 20w each and
RGBAW+Uv. The deal ment the
unit price was $50. I brought those in to this
auditorium just to see how they'd do.
The school asked me to put together a bid to replace the fresnels with these
LED Par cans. The school district has an initiative to
switch over to all
LED lighting in their buildings so changing to LEDs in the
auditorium was in
line with that initiative. The school gave me a $5k budget including 2 follow spots...
I decided to put 10 of the
LED PAR's on each pipe. The maintenance guys added 3 new 20amp
circuit drops from above the
stage by each of the 3 batons. The
stage does not have a fly
system. I daisey chained the
power along the
baton to the 10
LED PAR's.
I had already added a couple
truss pipes on the
house side walls with 6- 1kw
Leko's per side for better front lighting and had added a
DMX distribution box at that time, both 5 & 3 pin I/O (along with 2x6channel
dimmer packs). I ran another
DMX signal
line from the
distro box to the
stage and Daisey chained the
led's with the 3-pin control signal.
It works well. The 'cheap'
led PAR's are plenty bright. The Uv is a nice touch with a high school around Halloween.
That
system has been running for 2+ years with no issues. The only problems are each can has a fan and when 30 are running over your head it's noticeable...mostly to me. No one has mentioned it to me. They only notice the fan noise when I
point it out. AND the
dimmer curve for the blue, and only the blue color, isn't smooth like you'd expect. When dimming up The blue color suddenly jumps on @ about 40%
power...and suddenly cuts off when dimming down. The other colors dimming curve is normal.
The
auditorium has an old but patcheable
DMX console. The
conventional dimmers/lights use
DMX channels 1-72, then I added 12 more dimmers/1kw
Leko's, channels 73-84, and the
house lights use 86-92. The old fresnels are still there and can be used for specials. I left
DMX channels 92-199 open for custom use, then gave each of the
LED PAR's a unique
address in 10
channel groups (each can uses 7 channels) starting with 200, then the next can starts at 210, then 230, 240,
etc. this gives max flexibility...but added time when initially patching.
If I were to do this again I'd eval more instruments looking at brightness, fan noise, color options, and smooth dimming curves. Then put together a good argument to the school district president to up the budget. As it was, I spent $1500 on the 30
led PAR's and $1500 for 2-follow Spotlights, leaving $2k for my labor.