multiplying power.

[ih8censorship]

As some of you know I'm a part time roadie for a rock band. Recently the band purchased more lighting equipment (specifically, a good 20 more "par cans") At the last show, we attempted to use those plus 2 racks of 4 larger par cans and 2 robotic "intelligent" lights, in addition to all the instruments and the fogger. So needless to say we had the capability to draw a lot of power.

Things would have *probably* been ok if all the lights weren't going at the same time, but we had someone from the venue run lights and he had them all on for a bit too long and we blew a fuse or popped a breaker or something somewhere along the line. I couldn't do anything about it as I was high up on a catwalk and I didn't know where to start looking for the problem anyway because at that point I didn't know if it was a cord that got tripped over, a breaker, a fuse, or something to do with the control panel. We found out later it wasn't a simple trip over a cord it was not having enough power and we were lucky it didn't take the instruments down too.

This has been a bit of a problem lately. Different venues are rated for different amounts of power, and non of us is an electrician so it's really a bit of a guessing game. (its a bit ironic non of us is an electrician, as the bands name is Lightswitch haha) One thing that I thought of, i dont even know if it is possible, but something like a power multiplier where it would take power input at some normal range and then use capacitors and/or batteries to keep the flow of power at a reasonable level. I know they make battery backups for computer systems, but I'm doubting they would be able to sustain lighting equipment for very long, unless maybe there were a few of them, i dont know as i really havent had much experience with battery backups. Also, equipment without batteries would be ideal, as batteries and cold sometimes do not agree. Any thoughts on this situation?

[zaqufant]

Well, a generator comes to mind. But gas prices being so high I doubt that would be very feasible.

One thing you might ask the venue before you set up is how many circuits the building is set up on, and if they can tell you what outlet/power source is on what circuit, so you can avoid overloading one certain circuit and throwing a breaker.

[C-Man]

well we had the same problem a few times , one time we rented a 50KW generator  (we had like 12KW of sound alone and it was just unreasonable getting that kind of power in that place) and ran some fucking heavy 3-phase wires.
Other times what helped was actually running multiple main leads and scpreading load accross them. The principle behind this is that the line (your main extention coord etc and basically anything that conveys power) has a certain resistance and that only allows a certain ammount of current to run throo it, so if you have say an extention coord of well lets say 4 ohms and a line of 250volts you can get max of
(power=current*voltage, and current=voltage/resistance so power=voltage^2/resistance ) 250^2/4 = 15KW which not alot cause if you're a road show you're probably packing at the very least 6KW of sound and the par cans if they are hallogen i'm gusing 1KW-2KW each

so next time try spreading your load accoross multiple leads and across multiple breakers if possible, use much thinker wire extention coord (bigger wire diameter gives less resistance) and shorter if possible. Consider getting a portable generator , can't immagine a road show without one cause most venues i came accross only had max of 3KW-5KW of power max and after that things become fuzzy (like once the entire house lights would dim to the beat lol).