so at my school we have all colortran equipment. we run a innovator lighting board and i believe we have colortran dimmer (but we are able to get to them). well one morning i walked into our theatre to do some work and found the strip lights on our second electric strobing. the board was off and i tried turning off the lights using the presets. but they still strobed on. so i ended up unplugging them. i left them unplugged for a month and a guy did a dance concert in our theatre and he used them. so they were working and not strobing. i found out that the school had a power outage the nught before they started strobing. then a couple of days ago i was working on a set and the power went out (bad storm). everything was fine until the generators kicked in and the storm light went on. well sure enough on the same electric and i believe same fixtures the strips light started to strobe. now im new to tech and im the only thing this school has but to me it sounds like something is wired wrong. can you guys think of any reasons of why this is happening? i told them to bring in the company that did the install but nothing has been done about that yet.
weird power outs
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I would just like to say that if you are "new" at lighting, electrical and tech in general, DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT go poking around in any wiring cabinets/junction boxes/dimmer racks/distribution panels/etc. Carelessness/inexperience with electricity is one of the easy ways to get yourself killed.
CONSULT A QUALIFIED ELECTRICIAN.
CONSULT A QUALIFIED ELECTRICIAN.
well they r locked in a mechanical room that the school decided the drama teacher or the fine arts teachers didnt need a key for. but that door isnt the problem cause i can get a janitor with the master key to open it. not the dimmer racks have locking doors on them. they r locked sometimes then left wide open other time. the school does not have the key for them and didnt even know that it was there until i came along. i think the county has the key to them because they came into r theatre to look at something and after they left i got in there and they were wide open.
Interesting. I'd definitely try to get ahold of the installers if this keeps up.
Here's one theory worth checking. If the dimmers are fed from the generator transfer switch, it could be a cooling issue. I'd be willing to bet that whatever exhaust fan or HVAC unit cools the dimmer room, isn't powered from the generator. This is an easy mistake for the building's electrical engineer to make.
So, a power outage hits, the generator runs, the dimmers continue to produce heat, and the room gets too hot. Now you have an unhappy dimming system that goes a bit wild until the controller is reset.
So, a power outage hits, the generator runs, the dimmers continue to produce heat, and the room gets too hot. Now you have an unhappy dimming system that goes a bit wild until the controller is reset.
i also ran into this kind of problem at my high school some years back. our older model ETC dimmers had been hit by lighting over the summer, causing random lights to strobe. we had to go through and test all the dimmer trays to find out which ones had been lost.
i also had another venue where an old strand CD80 rack was hit by lighting, fried the brains in the rack and automatically turned on the panic mode from the rack. the only way to kill the lights was to go back and trip all the dimmers until we could get the brains replaced.
i also had another venue where an old strand CD80 rack was hit by lighting, fried the brains in the rack and automatically turned on the panic mode from the rack. the only way to kill the lights was to go back and trip all the dimmers until we could get the brains replaced.
