House Lighting

[James]

I have just come back from a gig in a church where they have finished a refurb which involved replacing their house lights.

 

They currently have something like 28 300w halogen floods as down lighters in pairs at the tops of the pillars for the nave. 28 300w floods as uplighters 28 pinspots (either par36 or similar) uplighting the clearstorey windows (they are about 30' up so I didn't get a good look at them) with 12 300w floods as uplighters, 12 300w floods as downlighters and 12 par 36 (or whatever) for the chancel. The aisles each had a number (about 6 or 7 IIRC) of S4 Pars as downlighters, and the pinspots as uplighters. Generaly they used the downlighters as working lights / cleaning lights with both sets of uplighters as public house lights.

 

They also had about 12 S4s and 20 S4 Pars as lighting for the sanctuary area covering the speakers, altar and band.

 

Control is from 60ch of installed dimming, with an ETC Smartfade as controll with an archetectural control system run in parallel.

 

Just thought you might like to know how someone else has done it.

 

James

[sam.henderson]

Just remembered this thread. Have a read of it, it may give you some ideas!

 

Sam

[brad!]

AnyTronics make conventional house lighting eg tubes and the like that have DMX control

[david.elsbury]

You can lock the panels by holding down the "1-6" buttons and "7-12" buttons simultaneously.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi again...

If you lock one panel, does it lock them all? Or do you have to run around to each panel? Sorry for the silly question..

:P

David

[BlueShift]

This is a very interesting thread dave - as you seem to be in a very similar situation to me.

 

I work for Soul Survivor Church which is based in watford and we are refitting our main area and cafe, and will soon be refitting our secondary meeting area and adjacent meeting space aswell. Our main area is 1200 capacity standing, 800 seated - and our cafe fits a good 100-150 people seated and many more standing.

 

Im also toying with the same idea of having your regular console aswell as some form if idiot proof wall control.

 

In terms of houselighting - we decided to leave our flourescent lights in place purely as working lights which would not be integrated into the control system. They have a switch by the door for control. We would then bounce cheap 500w flood units off of the cieling for dimmable houselights. As has been mentioned we are required by law to have energy efficient lighting. And if nothing else - we dont want the cleaners running 3kw of floods for hours and running up our electricity bill!

 

basically my plan is to have chilli pro (or similar) dimmers and then have control panels mounted on the walls. The nice thing about the chilli pro system is that I can monitor all the dimmers in our whole facility from a single location and the dimmers can automatically allow DMX precedance over wallpanel controls, thereby fogoing the need to lock the wallpanels. However, all wallpanels can be locked simultaneously from the master control panel.

 

So for your little meeting, or similar event - we have a wall controller by the sound desk (because there is always a technician there) which can recall some general purpose scenes. The cafe area would be entirely run by such a system - although would be controlled aswell by the main area console to facilitate quick scene programming. These scenes can then be saved to the dimmers and recalled by wall panels.

 

Another great thing is that the zero88 install 6 dimmers (cheaper, lower spec units) are also chillinet capable and can be monitored alongside chilli pro dimmers by the master controller.

 

So all in all a nice integrated system. And when we redo our other venue - we will have two seperately controlled dimmed systems with wall panels and a portable desk that can be plugged in for more complex events. simple events can just run on wall panel control.

[mac.calder]

A venue I just did JC at had a relatively good houselight control system, although it was quite old. Their external pannels had three faders (I cannot remember what each one did) and a small LED that had 'Control' below it which indicated whether the pannels had control over the system. There was a momentary action key switch (ie the key sprung back to position zero when released) which would give control to that pannel. In the bio box, there was the same thing, only it was just a push button switch which gave control to the desk. There was also a pannel in the prompt corner which had a red button with 'take control' below it for the same purpose.

 

I have no idea what company did it, because the things were just plain steel plates and there were no brandings anywhere. It was nifty for opening and lock up too, because if the faders were down on the exit door and you just inserted the key and turned, the lights slowly faded down and the same went for when you opened up, when you came in the entry door (they had two different doors backstage, god knows why) and turned the key, they came up slowly, prolonging lamp life.