House lights controlled by Lighting Mixer

[akscooter]

I was wondering how many people incorporate their house lights into their lighting mixer board. If so, how do you wire it in to a DMX system?

The setup we have causes an outage if someone throws a switch.

We have our main house lights on a dimmer in the sound booth. We also have a switch in the foyer for on/off. When the house lights are on, and someone throws the foyer switch, all the house lights turn off with no control from the booth.

Apparently, the wiring from that switch to the booth does not have the ability to support a three way switch.

If you have your house lights tied into your lighting board, do you have a rogue switch for those without access to the booth?

Thanks

[Esoteric]

You have to remove the houselights from the standard switches and dimmers you are talking about and have them wired into your dimmer system. It can be quite expensive and should ONLY be undertaken by a qualified, licensed electricians. Once this is wired properly you can add button or LCD panels in various strategic locations.

Mike

[jpallman]

We have our incandescent lights on a dimmer pack with no extra switches. We have florescent lights that we use outside of services that have switches downstairs.

We also have a 2 remote panels to control our dimmers like Mike mentioned but we ended up disconnecting them since people would not turn the lights off completely sometimes (they just dimmed them most of the way). They get by just fine with the florescent lights during the week. If you don't have a second lighting system, the remote panels are the way to go.

[Ebroach]

We just installed our house lighting dimmer system. And yes it can be controlled using our ETC Smartfade 24/96 board.

Our dimmer pack is a Lightronics AR-1202RTC 12 channel, 2400w/chnl DMX-512.
We are using 7 of the 12 channels. We have 2 lightronics AC-1009 8 scene button stations in sanctuary.

For out Theatrical lights we have a ETC ETSL1210T Dimmer Pack. Using all 12.

Both House and Theatrical lights are controlled by the Smartfade 24/96 board.

[tcahall]

We have a similar setup to yours in that we run all the incandescents through a dimmer and have the switches in the circuit. If the switches are turned off, house lights will go off. We have a separate set of florescents that are on a separate switch that has a switch next to each entrance to the sanctuary (satisfying code). In order to prevent the in service switch offs, we are looking at a lock box that closes over the switch bank that requires a key for access. This seems preferable to losing total control of the lights (florescents are not enough for during the week in our sanctuary)

Tim.

[EBAC LD]

We used to have the same setup... Pain the in the rear, not to mention can be extremely distracting in a worship service. What dimmer are you using for the house?

[D.R.HADDOCK]

Originally Posted by akscooter

I was wondering how many people incorporate their house lights into their lighting mixer board. If so, how do you wire it in to a DMX system?

The setup we have causes an outage if someone throws a switch.

We have our main house lights on a dimmer in the sound booth. We also have a switch in the foyer for on/off. When the house lights are on, and someone throws the foyer switch, all the house lights turn off with no control from the booth.

Apparently, the wiring from that switch to the booth does not have the ability to support a three way switch.

If you have your house lights tied into your lighting board, do you have a rogue switch for those without access to the booth?

Thanks

I left the existing house lights and instaled a two way switch, I can turn them off or on from the booth, i also instaled a second set of incandesant house lights and wired them to the main dimmer system.
it works well, but of course you need an electricain to do it,
but there should be plenty of electrians willing to help! just ask! worst thing they can do is say no,

[tpichler]

Our house lights are on the same system as the rest of the stage lights. We have an ETC system that we configured to surrender to DMX whenever DMX is present. So when we shutdown our DMX signal the wall based button panels work but when we take control the button panel does not function. Very handy for allowing maintenance type lighting while still allowing full control of house lighting.

[2cool]

We had the same problem and just installed a lock box. Eventually we upgraded the wiring so that the master control is in the sound booth.