Show Power Outlets

Full Disclosure, I'm a music teacher by trade and new to running and programming lights. We have a fairly new theater (4 years old). We run our lighting system with an ETC Ion Xe. Our system is equiped with 2 touch screen pads that allow operation of the house lights, rehearsal lights and orchestra shell without turning on the lightboard. When the lightboard is on the touch screen has a menu to toggle between console and mutual control. In that same menu it has a toggle for house power, and show power.

Show Power controls a bunch of our theater outlets. With the light board off, I can power on and off what ever is plugged into those outlets. When the light board comes on however, these outlets are powerd and the toggle on the touch pad does not work. I can't figure out how to toggle them on and off through the light board. It seem like I should be able to use them to contol scenary lamps and other such things but I can;t figure it out.

Does anyone have ewxperience with how this might work? 

  • You will likely need to find out how your show power circuits are patched on the board. Then determine if the tech that patched them set them up in the park menu or a start show preset. Typically, we set those to a park channel so that when the board is on, the circuits that power the LEDs are on automatically so you don't have to turn them on. The wall touch screens never get turned off, so you need a way to turn them on and off. 

  • Following up on Alan's comment,

    Check in the top right corners of your Ion screens and see if there's a "Parked Channels" tag in white. If there is, you can hit [Park] twice to look at the parked channels. You can unpark those channels and see if it's what you're looking for. If it is, you'll have to identify which macro is being used for the startup macro (in the Setup/System Settings menu) and remove those channels from the macro.

    If it's not a parked channel, then check back in and we can dig deeper.