renegadeblack
Active Member
I'm sure the school has a backup system. Emergency lighting is required in any public building. At MVPAC certain lights in our house lighting system are connected to an ETC ELTS system which bypasses the dimmers and connects them directly to the backup generator if the power fails. It is impossible to turn off the lights while the genset is running without cutting the service. There is no off switch and there is no circuit breaker in the dimmer room for it ether as the backup genset control and breakers are in a completely seperate room in the building. I'm sure your school has some type of backup system, maybe if you were to take a picture of your schools dimmer closet and post it here we could be of some more assistance in maybe recognizing what type of emergency system you may have.
Well part of the reason that I was so concerned was that when I killed the power to the rack, no emergency lights came on. There are two emergency relays that control a row of the work lights and a few house lights aswell. The only reason that I can tell what they control was because when you press the test button on the relays, the lights go out. I had assumed that when I cut the power to the rack, those relays would get flipped. As I said, I saw a guy there who was working on the system one day and haven't heard news about whether or not it had been fixed or have I gotten a chance to test if it had been fixed. Granted I'm not even certain if the emergency system supplies power if there is electricity present. I'm also not certain that the relays react depending on whether or not there is power going into the rack. I will take pictures though of all of the equipment involved including the relays and the emergency transformers in the basement a little ways away. When I spoke to the guy, he seemed to specify that those transformers supplied the lights in the auditorium.