Source 4 Profile Reflectors

[sigill]

has anyone else found that the reflectors in a source 4 profile do not seem to be able to take the heat of the lamp. Whilst cleaning a load of these last week during some general maintenance I found that 90% of Source 4 profiles I cleaned had damaged reflectors. By damaged I mean that the reflective coating had started to flake off. In all cases it was only the area of the reflector above the lamp that was damaged. The units are not that old and I just wondered if this was a common fault.

 

Si

[Ben]

are the lamps alined properly? if they are all leaning to one side the fact that the heat distribution is very uneven can cause that to happen, its to do with different parts being very different temperatures while its on and they expand and contract oddly causing the glaze to crackle and flake. this is true for lots of lanterns and is a good reason to make sure all the lamps are aligned

[Fender Bender]

Had a numder of S4's with reflectors flakeing. Etc replaced them all saying it was down to a manufacturing fault. I didn't have any further problems once replaced

[mikienorth]

Ours are 8 years old, or so I am led to believe. Out of 34 S4 zooms, when reflectors were cleaned vigorously by myself this year, not one was damaged in any way.

Do as Fender Bender says, ask ETC, sounds like it could be of interest to them.

[timmath]

I've seen it on pars but not profiles - are you using 750w or 575w lamps? we only seem to have the issue with 750w in older fittings. Since changing all our pars to MCM's they've been fine.

 

regards

 

tim

[Fender Bender]

Don'f know about Sigill's but our profiles used 575w & approx 2 - 4 years old

[sigill]

Thats interesting Fender Bender. The ones I am talking about are the same age but are 750w units but is stands to reason that if a 575w lamp is going damage it a 750w will as well.

 

Thanks for the posts guys. looks like a call to ETC is in order.

 

Si

[eamon]

hi

 

Just a quick question. On the subject of cleaning S4's, what do people use for lenses and reflectors. I prefer to just clean them with a good chammy/cloth.

What do people use if any??

 

sorry meant to say lubricants etc

 

cheers again

 

eamon

 

Moderation: Two posts merged. If your post is still the last in the topic, then please use the edit button to add anything, rather than posting another message directly below one of your own.

[sigill]

All sorted.

 

 

I spoke to etc and they are aware of a bad batch of reflectors. The batch number on mine are 02/01 which is part of the bad batch. and they are now replacing all the damaged reflectors (16 in total) free of charge, even though the units in question are 6 years old. Great service. I hope this post help anyone with the same problem.

 

Si

[agermich]

We were cleaning our lanterns today and found that all but one of our source 4 juniors had cracks in the reflectors. If it had just been one or two off them I'd have suspected that they'd been knocked about and would have brought replacements but as it was almost all of them we thought that there must have been something amiss. Etc were contacted and even though they said that they weren't aware of any problems they agreed to replace all of the reflectors. Another example of etc's faultless customer service .

 

Mike

[gareth]

Faultless indeed. Compare it with Strand's reaction to this problem a couple of years ago. An initial flurry of denial of responsibility, then a cautious curiosity, followed by a bit more interest, and then the disappearance of the entire company in its original form (accompanied, no doubt, by whatever chance we may have had of getting replacements out of them). I don't know whether anyone else managed to get any replacement reflectors before the old Strand collapsed, but we didn't - and we have almost 100 of the buggers, with quite a lot of them exhibiting varying degrees of reflector degradation. Don't suppose there's a snowball's chance in hell of Genlyte showing any interest at all in a problem which will probably be deemed "nothing to do with us".