Hilary Watts

Most impressive!

It depends exactly what you mean by "pendant bulb fixture" but for £250 you could buy two 15 metre lengths of festoon harness from this page together with eighty 15W or 25W golf ball bulbs to fit from the same firm and the total load would be well within the capacity of a 15 Amp dimmer. Do check though that the dimmer is rated at 15 Amps. Just because it is connected via a 15A plug and socket does not mean that the load capacity is as much as that.

Would LOLER apply in this case? If the truss is put in position first and the projector is then attached to it I don't think there would be any 'lifting' or 'lowering' operations involved. It's possible that PUWER might apply although this raises the question as to whether the truss and projector are 'work equipment'. Irrespective of liability under these statutory instruments however there is the general duty of care under the Occupiers Liability Act 1957 - "The common duty of care is a duty to take such care as in all the circumstances of the case is reasonable to see that the visitor will be reasonably safe in using the premises for the purposes for which he is invited or permitted by the occupier to be there." Section 2(4)(b) provides a possible defence if the occupier has entrusted the work to an independent contractor and has taken reasonable steps to ensure that the independent contractor is competent to do the job. In this situation, since the consequences of harm if anything goes wrong are easily foreseeable then the 'occupiers' of the building (who may be the church council, pastor, individual elders or anyone who has a degree of control over the building ) would be well advised to ensure that they are satisfied that the job has been done by a competent person or firm who has the necessary experience and/or training to provide assurance that the job has been done properly and safely, both in the choice of equipment used and in the method(s) of attaching or suspending it. This does not mean the job must be done by a 'professional' but does require that the person doing it has shown some experience and/or training together with an appreciation of the risks involved and has demonstrated they have taken steps to mitigate them - eg - providing calculations for the loading on the truss involved based on figures from the manufacturer's load tables and being able to provide re-assurance that the balcony rails are sufficiently strong and/or firmly fixed to ensure that they can take the load involved (this latter may well be a matter of judgement based on experience of having fixed or suspended similar loads in the past since it's highly unlikely that any paperwork will be available to back this up). I am not a professional but have in the past suspended temporary trussing in a church (working according to the manufacturers load tables) and have recently suspended a small projector in a church (on a substantial pre-existing steel frame). I am happy to justify both of these on the basis of my previous experience, but if the trussing had been required to carry moving heads rather than half a dozen PAR 56 lanterns or the projector had been a big Barco model then I would have declined to do the job. Perhaps that is a measure of the competence of the indiviudual - does the person show an awareness of his/her limitations?

On the advice of Steve Lloyd at LeMaitre I silver-soldered the thermocouple back on to the element of a Neutron hazer and it works fine. Hilary

see this thread. ...and in particular note Brian's post concerning the demux in the dimmer rack. It doesn't actually answer the question but it looks as if things aren't exactly straightforward!

Yes,of course - ASL it is. Could a Mod change the topic title please? That explains why my google search failed. A search using the correct name immediately reveals a supplier. Thanks for your help. The blue room triumphs once again!

Does anyone know where it is possible to obtain a spare volume control pot for an AST beltpack as shown here . It incorporates a mounting bracket which forms the back of the pot itself and extends round the sides. The only marking is '10KB' There are some ALPS models which are vaguely similar and various american sites supply a Peavey component which at first sight looks similar but the bracket is at the front of the pot rather than the rear. I've looked at RS and Mouser but can't find anything. Any ideas? Hilary

I seem to remember having a similar problem a year or two ago with a desktop computer. I think I eventually minimised the problem by moving the audio PCI card as far away as possible from the video PCI card (ie moved them to different PCI slots with another card or cards between them) and came to the conclusion that somehow the video card was radiating an rf signal which was being picked up by the audio card. It may be that the audio and video circuits in the laptop are very close together but by moving the audio to an external USB device you've taken it away from the rf generated by the video card. If this is the case then the only solution may be an external audio card.