New Lighting Install with ETC NET3 Nodes

[pete LD]

Last week I did 2 days work on a nearly finished new build school drama space.

They have about 90 ways of dimming spared over 3 bridges in the smallish space (100 or so retractable seats).

They have in there new stock 8 Mac 250s and 12 scrollers.

To control this they have an ETC ION. All normal.

Now instead of a DMX patch to the bridges they have 4 loose NET 3, 2 way nodes and several Ethercon tie lines on all the utility panels.

This to me seems a bit of overkill for a tiny school space? Surely a nice DMX patch and a 12-way splitter would do the job nicely and far easer?

I rigged a Scroller PSU and instead of plugging the DMX out of the utility panel I had to put in a node and still had to go and patch it!

Is this not just another thing to go wrong? Or am I missing something? Future proofing? Or is it just money being spent on things that look nice?

Is this the way all new installs are going? I can almost see the point in large venues but just not tiny schools?

[timmeh2]

Hi

 

Sounds like somebody got bamboozled and paid for a load of stuff they didn't really need.

 

I'm all up for redundancy on massive builds with miles of CAT5 and nodes flying everywhere but in a school were the building's function will change very little, it all seems OTT.

 

All the best

Timmmeh

[andy_s]

given that they would have put the cat5 in anyway, they will have saved a few quid by omitting a DMX network when the data can be sent over cat5. whether they will have saved enough money to cover the cost of the nodes to talk to the DMX kit that is still prevalent will depend on how big the venue is - we did just this in a new build a while ago - the desk talks to the dimmers over ethernet, no DMX required, the price of nodes came down drastically, so we spent about £2k on the nodes, the money saved by cutting the DMX network was significantly more than that, so it made sense on a tight budget, though operationally it is a little more fiddly, and there is still a fair bit of loose DMX cable used...

[timmeh2]

Hi

 

That maybe true - however you could omit the nodes altogether and just have some jumpers at either end. 90 ways of dimming plus another universe for the movers. That's just one run of CAT5. Or you could be greedy and use all four pairs.

 

All the best

Timmeh

[andy_s]

but the cat 5 network can and has been used for other things than just lighting, so it made sense in our case to cut the building-wide DMX and keep the building-wide ethernet. We're talking about a building project here somewhat larger than the OP's 100-seat 90 dimmer installation, two universes are in use for generics and working lights / unison, so the cost of the network as far as I recall would have been at least four times the cost of the nodes, so as a value-engineering exercise it was worthwhile. It bought a few more dimmer modules to populate the racks, which I thought at the time was a good thing.

 

As I said, whehter the same benefit would apply in a small installation is a moot point, I was merely examining the possible logic behind the decision.