Scoops!

[jthtiger]

I posted awhile back asking for plans to overhaul our room with dimmable house lighting.

I've been doing some research and came across a fixture that has never crossed my mind before. The Scoop light. We use them in our theatre at college for work light, but would they be good for a house lighting scenario? What would be the pros and cons?

-Tyler Herron

[RickR]

Their biggest problem is that they are extremely inefficient.
Big and ugly doesn't help.

[waynehoskins]

We used them for houselight in the black box in college, and they worked great for that.

Pros: big wash of light, lamps last forever

Cons: not quartz (unless we're talking about the new quartz scoops), less efficient than quartz, big lamps (1000IF or 1500IF), big fixtures, not new and trendy.

All that said, I've often thought about them for houselight at my church. Their big advantage is they're crazy wide, meaning you can cover an area with fewer lights.

[Les]

I like the scoop light myself.

It is less efficient when compared one light to another, however, I think they close the gap in certain situations in efficiency when you look at them as a total. Since you typically need fewer lights they can be almost as efficient, if not as efficient, as other incandescent options.

We haven't gone in depth on our discussion on house lights for a venue we're a part of opening (hopefully) in the next few months, but on the top of the list and certainly a very viable option is the scoop light.

I would certainly consider them, just make sure you have dimmers/power behind them especially if you are replacing florescent lights.

What are your other options?

[jthtiger]

Well, our current house lighting is flouros with those high bay gym lights as well. I don't want to replace anything as our sanctuary is a gym for the school. What I do want, is the ability to dim the house lights for our song set, and bring them up for the sermon, all from the console. I like the idea of adding incandescent because not only can you dim them, they would provide a different atmosphere to the whole room.

Other options include getting upwards of 32 1Kw pars and a dimmer rack, but that is way out of our budget. I like the scoop idea, because I think I could get away with 8 total, and we could probably use shoebox dimmers as well. I'd like to get 4 packs to keep the load on the packs down, since the scoops are 1Kw (correct?).

We could get LED's to add. I saw a church at 25 Chauvet COLORado 2's as their house lighting system, but at $1000 a pop, that is not the route we're taking.

Dimmable flouros. I didn't like that option from the start. And from what I hear, no one else does either.

Basically, any other option I've looked at is upwards of $10,000. I can't present that to the church. They would not see a return on investment at all. However, I'll bet if I do 8 scoops and 4 dimmers (somewhere in the ballpark of $2000), they could go for that.

-Tyler Herron

[D.R.HADDOCK]

I use the same reflectors in our church house lights,
But I use T25 lamps in ours,
They work real well,
If you paste this into your browser-
http://www.freshwater.org.au/gallery...QwMTE3M2FkMDY0
Then you can see three of them just in front of the front lighting bar,
There are two more rows of three further back in the room,
But you cant see them in the picture.
They are a good economical fitting.
And in our case have worked well.

[Les]

Tyler,

In most places the portable dimmers are designed for temporary, portable, use only and not for a permanent install.

Typically the less expensive dimmers add noise, both acoustical and electrical, into the system.

Also, a scoop is typically going to be a 1000W or 1500W lamp in them. Not many portable dimmers can handle those wattages per channel. In fact, I don't know any that will do 1500 watts on one channel, the most I've seen is 1200 watts per channel. And even those are at least $500 each, so right there you're at $2000 plus lights.

I think it would be cheaper to get a rack mount dimmer setup. You can get an 8 channel setup from Leprecon or Lightronics for less than $2000.

The lights themselves start around $200 new for the Altman AL155 and they go up from there. So, you're at $1600 for those.

Realistically buying new you're cost would be closer to $3600 plus wiring and labor to install.

To get to the $2k mark you'll need to buy used.

[jthtiger]

Hmmm, a little more than expected, but still it's not unreasonable.

I think I'll go ahead and put a presentation together and show it to our pastor.

Thanks for your help guys!
-Tyler Herron

[D.R.HADDOCK]

It is not neccesary to have large lamps in these fitttings.
With modern high output lamps available.
I use T25 lamps in mine. thats only 500w per fitting,
More than adaquite in my case,
I rarely have to run them at full output.
And I get good life from the lamps.
Modern theatre style lamps are getting more and more output
as time goes on.
I run nine of these fittings on three dimmer channels.
Easy as.

[jthtiger]

D.R. HADDOCK, would you still recommend getting a dimmer rack, or could we use the packs?

I would love to get a dimmer rack, but if we were to buy one I'd want to get a real one that we could move all our lights to. Of course, do you guys recommend house lights and stage lights on different racks? If that's the case, I could grab a 12 channel for the house, and then get a 48+ channel for stage lights later down the road.

How does that sound?

-Tyler Herron

[Esoteric]

You do not have to separate them, and in fact if you install all your racks at once it would actually be cheaper labor wise than to do it one at a time.

I recommend an ETC Sensor Rack for your stage lights and ETC Unison Rack for your house lights.

Mike

[jthtiger]

What's the difference? We wouldn't need any architectural systems in place because if we add scoops, they would not be replacing any current system. We would only use them for the services, or any event where we use the stage lighting. We have flouros and high bay tungsten gym lights currently. They use the gym lights for school basketball games (I think, I'm not sure if they even use them any more), and we use the flouros for everything else.

So the scoops (house) would be controlled by the board and only the board. That way, no one can mess with them during the service. Yes, that happens. We turned 3/4 of the lights off for the service one day, and some congregation member decided they didn't like it, so they walked over to the wall and turned on all the flouros halfway through the P&W set. I was very mad, and it was very distracting. However, we can make sure that doesn't happen in the future if we add the scoops.

-Tyler Herron