What to do with old lighting equipment

[david.elsbury]

13 hours ago, graemeftv said:

Well I am saddened that the worlds largest and only super store of used kit has not struck the Blue room members yet.

We buy up kit and Recycle every part!

If we cant sell it at our silly stupid cheap prices (plugs sockets hook clamps all 15p each!! yes 15 pence)

we will strip down lanterns to remove glass, cables bulbs cables etc. as green as possible! and very time consuming!

more modern stuff gets fixed and even offered with warranty and worldwide shipping.

All with super easy addons like what plug you want fitted etc.

Our average sale time for a product is less than 3 days! the turnover of stock is massive

And to add to that we generate over 60% of our own electric, put less than 10kg of waste in landfill each week and do not purchase any packing materials! its All Reused! 

The most difficult part of the whole process is to get the theatres and owners of kit to make a very small effort to box it, email us back etc. You would be amazed How people just cant be bothered! they would rather let it sit and rust until it is then really scrap! everyone just replaces the new kit and shifts the old to the basement!

 

So apart from this being a plug for our website hopefully it might help save the planet just a little!

 

 

 

 

Are you going to reply to the question about your huge DMX splitter, Graeme? Or just post advertisements?

[Muller_Light]

What we really want is someone to produce a DMX controlled RGB 'lamp' assembly that could be fitted (with a bit of metalwork modification) to an old spot or Fresnel lamp.  The equipment could then have a second life.  It would have to be cheap, though....

  

[J Pearce]

I’ve actually done this on a small low power scale on a pair of P123Bs, using the guts of a wifi LED RGBWW lamp (from Athom). The chip on board could run WLED and receive SACN or Artnet.
 

The biggest issue is thermal management as LEDs need to run cool. I doubt you’d get good LED life out of anything much over 25W in a fitting designed for halogen lamps.

Edited August 21, 2023 by J Pearce
Extra info

[alistermorton]

A chap on FB in one of the lighting groups has Frankesteined a Beamz 50W RGBAW Cob light into a Patt 123 and it works ok for eye candy but of course it's not as bright or the same quality of light as a real 123.

[themadhippy]

Quote

Well I am saddened that the worlds largest and only super store of used kit has not struck the Blue room members yet.

Ebay? im sure we've all heard of them   or do you mean usedlighting dot com?

[sunray]

7 hours ago, J Pearce said:

I’ve actually done this on a small low power scale on a pair of P123Bs, using the guts of a wifi LED RGBWW lamp (from Athom). The chip on board could run WLED and receive SACN or Artnet.
 

The biggest issue is thermal management as LEDs need to run cool. I doubt you’d get good LED life out of anything much over 25W in a fitting designed for halogen lamps.

Any more detail?

[bruce]

6 hours ago, alistermorton said:

A chap on FB in one of the lighting groups has Frankesteined a Beamz 50W RGBAW Cob light into a Patt 123 and it works ok for eye candy but of course it's not as bright or the same quality of light as a real 123.

I've seen similar with old parcan shells, with small LED floods inside (the external ones that are about a fiver!) inside, Used for effect/uplighting outside a venue, and had the bonus of the internals being Ip65.

[J Pearce]

1 hour ago, sunray said:

Any more detail?

One of these 15W ESP8285 based LED bulbs gutted to its power module and LED PCB (retaining the heatsink part of the bulb housing), mounted on the lamp holder with some plastic bits and silicone adhesive. They run WLED so will listen to SACN over wifi - probably good enough for decor use, but not sure I'd want to use it for cued stage lighting due to latency over wifi. My use case is not work related, so I've not tried the SACN, but I'm led to believe WLED's SACN integration is pretty solid.

You can't run the LEDs with RGB and both whites all at 100% without implementing forced air cooling, but with a bit of power limiting it's fine with passive cooling. You get a bit of flood/spot control, but not proper focussing as the source is so large. Brightness is 15W of LED, minus some losses through the lens etc. so not especially punchy, but for atmospheric or eye candy use, perhaps useful in work context.

[sunray]

23 hours ago, bruce said:

I've seen similar with old parcan shells, with small LED floods inside (the external ones that are about a fiver!) inside, Used for effect/uplighting outside a venue, and had the bonus of the internals being Ip65.

I'll get the hard hat out before I confess...

A school wanted loads of uplighters for outdoors for a Christmas show, lets say 25. I found an Ebay ad for 10W units at £4.99 including post or make offer. Being cheeky I offered £1 for the quantity, he counter offered at £4 but also offered 12V 10W at £2. I paid for the required number and he sent a few extra.

All the lab PSU's came out to play on that one. Hiding them in parcans?... Naaaaah tin cans from the kitchen about 300mm high by 175mm dia painted brick colour, stand it on the ground pointing up, JD, dead easy.

They weren't great but they were effective and functional, the colour changing programs didn't stay in sync of course. However last time I saw them they were being used around the hall but not quite the same shape as original, they had added IR LEDs and used a Raspberry PI to mimic the remote control.

[sunray]

23 hours ago, J Pearce said:

One of these 15W ESP8285 based LED bulbs gutted to its power module and LED PCB (retaining the heatsink part of the bulb housing), mounted on the lamp holder with some plastic bits and silicone adhesive. They run WLED so will listen to SACN over wifi - probably good enough for decor use, but not sure I'd want to use it for cued stage lighting due to latency over wifi. My use case is not work related, so I've not tried the SACN, but I'm led to believe WLED's SACN integration is pretty solid.

You can't run the LEDs with RGB and both whites all at 100% without implementing forced air cooling, but with a bit of power limiting it's fine with passive cooling. You get a bit of flood/spot control, but not proper focussing as the source is so large. Brightness is 15W of LED, minus some losses through the lens etc. so not especially punchy, but for atmospheric or eye candy use, perhaps useful in work context.

Thank you for the idea.

I have a couple of P45's which I keep thinking I could to do something for display, I was planning to use 10 or 20W RGB floods.

We dropped a bulb a little while back and it broke up, I think much smaller like 2 or 3W of RGB, at the time it struck me something should be doable with them.

Somehow I got the feeling your 'lamp' referred to a fitting rather than a bulb.

[david.elsbury]

18 minutes ago, sunray said:

 

Somehow I got the feeling your 'lamp' referred to a fitting rather than a bulb.

Yep. Lamp/fixture/unit vs Lamp/bubble/globe.. too many names for the same thing!

[sunray]

12 hours ago, david.elsbury said:

Yep. Lamp/fixture/unit vs Lamp/bubble/globe.. too many names for the same thing!

That is the problem with complicated languages like ours where lack of education (not meant in a nasty way) corrupts it, particularly where translations with foreign languages occur.

In the old days it seemed so simple; a bulb or a wick went in a lamp. Fire (for light) went in a lantern, A lamp holder was a hook or bracket to hold a lamp and a bulb holder held a bulb, typically hanging on flex or in a lamp etc.

 

 

Edited August 23, 2023 by sunray

[Heptagon]

Slight thread shift - I have some Pat 45s that I want to give away, but does anyone know if the cables are asbestos sheathed? 

[J Pearce]

There’s a very good chance that they could be. 
If you’re not confident in identifying asbestos cable you probably want to seek help (or dispose of responsibly).