Power consumption of lighting fixtures

[adam2]

Lots of good advice in the preceeding posts.

I would however be very wary of any advice from persons used to houseboats ! IME supply to housboats often consists of an overloaded d0mestic extension lead, with the earth removed because "it makes the trip thingy trip"

 

I would certainly be concerned at the use of an unreliable or intermittant source of electricity for a public space.

If emergency lighting is provided from batteries as is usuall, then these are probably either worn out or seldom fully charged and wont work when called on.

 

 

[MikeDennis]

Hi guys,

 

Two months on and I'm more clued-in on our power dilemma. Apologies for causing dismay and concern amongst the more experienced of technicians here.

 

There are (but it's becoming a "were") two main problems:

 

1) We get some very pissed, destructive young people on board some nights who do things like rip the lights off the wall in the blokes' toilets. This, I'm told, would trip the breakers in the distribution box supplying the blokes' toilets and everything in that box then followed suit.

 

2) Our landline supply is three-phase from a green box on the quayside. Each phase provides 100A. The load on these three phases is not equally distributed.

 

 

In trying to address the problem of the vandalism, lights set into walls have been fitted in the gents and those circuits now use 5mA rather than 10mA fuses - the purpose of this being that if they were to trip, the earth leakage would not trip the entire box. (I have not been involved in this process and would very much appreciate anyone helping to fill in the gaps in my understanding of this)

 

As for the imbalance between phases - at our busiest times during a club night with everything on and pumping, the red phase peaks at around 40A, the yellow phase is always very close to 100A and the blue phase hovers between 30-40A. Having spent some time studying the distro box in my amp room/tech office, I've got to the point now where I believe the only sound/lighting devices that draw power from the yellow phase are 8 13A sockets on stage. The amp for our subs and our dimmer racks were drawing power from the yellow phase but I'm now only using the MACs so have disconnected the dimmer racks and the sub is now powered by the red phase.

 

We have an electrician coming in to re-balance the phases in the coming weeks and are able to use the generator until the end of September so things are looking a lot more secure.

 

Does anybody have any thoughts/insight on any of this?