Colorsource Relay powered by parked dimmer?

Hi all,

So this is a hypothetical question. And I am aware (for the most part) of what the official ETC response may be on this subject. So please only provide factual information if you have it, or have heard it directly from ETC.

Does the Colorsource relay have circuiting built in that allows it to be powered from a parked dimmer? Or is it in the same situation as any electronic fixture like the Colorsource that requires non-dim or constant power only?

Situation is this...

Planning a theatre upgrade from halogen to LED. Theatre currently has 2 x Strand Supervisor CD80 racks with 192 dimmers (96 cards x 2 dimmers each) in the rack. We need to know if we can purchase Colorsource relays and park a dimmer at full to power those relays or if we have to forego the Colorsource relay and just put relay cards or non-dim cards into our Supervisor rack itself.

Thoughts or comments are much appreciated.

Thanks.
Darren

Darren W. Hales
Head Electrician - Granville Island Stage
Arts Club Theatre Company
Vancouver, BC

Parents
  • Are you just trying to power the relay and using it as a wireless DMX receiver, or are you also powering fixtures through the relay? The CS Relay does not affect the power passing through it, so it doesn't offer any additional protection or conditioning in the latter arrangement. For the CS Relay itself, the same rule as fixtures applies: it should get non-dim or relay power only, and parking a dimmer at full from the console is not equivalent to that.

    The good news is that the CD80SV rack should have a non-dim mode configurable at the dimmer rack. See page 79 (PDF page 87) of the manual for details on how to configure this: http://www.strandlighting.com/clientuploads/directory/downloads/CD80SV.pdf

  • Thanks so much for responding, Mark.

    Basically, we have to decide whether to bite the bullet and pull out all the dimmer racks and replace them with ETC Relay racks or just replace 1/3 or 2/3 of our dimmer cards with non-dim cards so we still have access to conventional dimming on our socas for practical fixtures.

    So, I will do some quick reading on the Strand CD80SV processor and see about changing cards into non-dim or if we actually just replace the cards with non-dim cards. At this point, because the LED fixtures are also part of this upgrade, I doubt we could budget for new relay racks and their installation as well. But we shall see how it all plays out.

    Thanks again for your answers. They confirmed exactly what I expected.

    Cheers
    Darren

    Darren W. Hales
    Head Electrician - Granville Island Stage
    Arts Club Theatre Company
    Vancouver, BC
Reply
  • Thanks so much for responding, Mark.

    Basically, we have to decide whether to bite the bullet and pull out all the dimmer racks and replace them with ETC Relay racks or just replace 1/3 or 2/3 of our dimmer cards with non-dim cards so we still have access to conventional dimming on our socas for practical fixtures.

    So, I will do some quick reading on the Strand CD80SV processor and see about changing cards into non-dim or if we actually just replace the cards with non-dim cards. At this point, because the LED fixtures are also part of this upgrade, I doubt we could budget for new relay racks and their installation as well. But we shall see how it all plays out.

    Thanks again for your answers. They confirmed exactly what I expected.

    Cheers
    Darren

    Darren W. Hales
    Head Electrician - Granville Island Stage
    Arts Club Theatre Company
    Vancouver, BC
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