Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mike Monte]

This pic is from 2005. Not sure if that was the year we had only the 1 outlet. The setup was about the same most years. Same trailer for a stage. We could pull power from the ticket booth and the building behind the fence, except that year the booth tripped a breaker when someone plugged in a bouncy house and we didn't have a maintenance person available to restore power. (The bouncy house was not pre-approved)

Also, back then (at least for me) facetime was not really an option. By a "few" years ago, I really mean 10 to 15 years ago.

Yes, I know the adapter was not exactly code. I built it so I could easily measure plugged in current without opening a breaker box. That night I kept it in line for the event. Now there are more affordable means to do the same thing. (Although sometimes I'll still use this one to tell someone how much current that string of Edison lights is really pulling.)

The above set up looks similar to several ACS Relay fro Life gigs I did several years ago.  We had one "hard wired" (by an electrician) 20 amp feed to the stage from the snack shack.   
All was fine until the volunteers plugged in the coffee urns......  You could see the lights onstage dim with beat of the kick drum.

[Max Hall]

All was fine until the volunteers plugged in the coffee urns......  You could see the lights onstage dim with beat of the kick drum.

You did well to stay where you were long enough to see the impact. I would have got someone to vaguely watch console meters whilst I ran out with a long extension reel telling them to get their power somewhere else.

[Mike Monte]

You did well to stay where you were long enough to see the impact. I would have got someone to vaguely watch console meters whilst I ran out with a long extension reel telling them to get their power somewhere else.

There was no other place to get the power from.
scenario:
- ACS Relay for Life
- high school football field
- football field is surrounded by a track
- stage in one end zone next to goal post
- snack shack (where the power was) is located outside the radius of the track
- wire from the snack shack to stage is suspended 20' off the ground to allow the relayers to walk the track
The shack had four twenty amp circuits available (the fifth circuit was used for shack lights and a fridge)
The electrician ran a line from one circuit to the stage and taped over that line's outlets in the shack.

20 amps were a bit tight but we made it work....until one of the volunteers removed the tape from the outlet (in the shack) and plugged a coffee urn in....(there were four urns; one in each circuit).
I asked the volunteer if she could put two urns on one circuit to free-up our circuit.  She said that her boss told her to plug the 4 urns into separate circuits...

At that point I threw my hands in the air, told the activities director that the stage volume needed to come down a bit and rode it out.
My rig wasn't big (two Crown K2 & one K1 power amps) and we got through the gig.

I love volunteers....

[Ray Aberle]

You're a lot nicer (to both the volunteer and the activities director) then I would have been. To the AD: "We have a choice- either you have 4 coffee pots running, or we have sound for the stage. Please sort it out, but right now, we're dead in the water."

Another thing you can do in the future is to run a second feed from the other outlet on that same circuit- doesn't have to go anywhere (e-tape it off 50 feet away, out of sight), but it sounds as tho this volunteer wouldn't have unplugged YOU-- so if the other outlet was "in use," she wouldn't have used it.

-Ray

[ProSoundWeb Community]