House lights replacement

[TomHoward]

It might be worth investigating just how hours a year it is to estimate the payback time with a given saving - just as it’s not a huge load, if you used it 20 hours a week that’s £360 a year in electric, reduce that by 75% for LED and you’ve saved £270, so you just have to price accordingly so you don’t spend more than you save. And 20 hours a week might be a high estimate.

 

The Artistic Licence 4ch is designed just for this, it can go in the consumer unit using some or the existing wiring and they have a nice 4ch DMX wall plate with 4 rotary “dimmers” to go with it. Is the existing system pendant lights or soemtbibg with an ES lamp it doesn’t use Pars or similar?

[pmiller056]

The existing houselights system is mostly made of 50W GU10 downlighters and a few older 100/120W E27 R80 downlighters. It is a community theatre, so it probably was minumium cost at the time of installation. Given the height that they are mounted at, the illumination provided has a spread and 'feel' to that people like. There's plenty of choice (ranging from excellent to horrible) for LED replacement GU10's. The R80's are much harder to get and I suspect a sensible move would be to replace them with an appropriate number of GU10's for consistency and rationalising purchasing and spares-holding requirements.

 

If an Artistic Licence dimmer was chosen, it would need to go into a separate enclosure because there is no usable spare space in any relevant consumer unit. Being able to reuse the existing wiring in good condition with the AL dimmer along with good lamp choice data provided is a big reason for favouring it.

 

[alistermorton]

We're replacing a similar system (E27 reflectors) with ETC Arc system. The Old halogen lamps were getting like hen's teeth, and those we were able to find didn't last very long. Last palette load of gear arrived this week, so I guess we'll be installing between shows.