Power supply

[Skimble]

Thanks again all - more food for thought.

 

To clarify the size and demands of the venue: it's a community centre hall. Think 'church hall' with a stage. There are three amateur groups that use it, all with youth rather than adult performers. Current stage lighting comprises a series of 13A sockets in the roof (FOH) with six fixtures that look rather like the end of angle-poise lamps. We have light or we don't have light. On stage there are four more of these fixtures, plus four parcans with 13A lamps fitted in them. My daughter's director brings in two six-lantern stands with PAR56 lanterns controlled by a controller from the 1970s, three lanterns per fader (just the four of them). That's it. We don't have visiting shows, at the moment, or anyone who comes with particular riders, and there is no height or depth to enable the use of lifts or hoists. However, as you can probably see, a simple like-for-like project won't give us anything useful for the future.

 

At the moment the power for the stage lighting is provided via a board that also distributes power to other parts of the building, including a canteen, so the draw on current is significant, and will increase should we actually get hold of any half-decent lanterns. All our money comes in the form of grants because our facilities aren't good enough for performers to pay good money for them, although the potential in the centre is significant. We have to have the whole centre rewired anyway, so we want to build in enough power supply to enable us to run a show without worrying that we're going to blow everything at lights up. There is some ambition, but 'ambition' in this context is not what most of you would consider to be dream territory. If I could, initially, run twelve lanterns FOH and another eight on stage then that would be phenomenal. They would be conventional fittings at first because we won't be able to afford anything more than a bunch of second-hand equipment.

 

Installing three-phase as the rewiring is done is going to be our equivalent of flood-wiring with CAT5/6... We will probably not need the power for years, and by the time we're big enough to be hanging lots of the rig that will, by then, have been installed (current fittings are simply screwed to the rafters) the energy demands should have shrunk and we might never use it. However, surely it's better to have the power available if the install is being done anyway, and then we don't have to worry too much about what we're running. The school where I work has four dimmers (24 channels) and our big shows regularly draw from 20-30kW, and that's running a lot of Source 4 fixtures which have enabled me to squeeze more light out of the system for no more consumption. My 'ambition' would be to be able to run something not that much smaller, even though the centre stage is only one half to two thirds the size of the school one.

 

That's it. I probably remain naive, but with your words of caution regarding planning for too much for an unknown future I hope that I can make more sense of the brief I'm putting together for the contractors.

 

Do you have a member of staff who will be acting as the technical manager - as in the person all your visiting productions aim their questions at? This person would be the best one to get involved with this project.

 

Erm... That's likely to be me..! Good job we don't really have visiting productions, really. The only other person is our premises officer, and while he's good he isn't even a stage hand of any description, let alone a technical manager.