Re: ghost load

On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:53:06 -0800, nattynatty wrote:
> In a small blackbox
> theatre (in the US, if that matters), we often use various lights that
> are under 100W. Our dimmers do not dim these properly without a ghost
> load in parallel with them. However, we don't have anywhere to put
> another fixture for this purpose without the light from it being seen.
> Ideally, we'd like some sort of a "dummy load box" to use for this
> purpose that was a proper resistive load, but *not* a source of light.
> Does anyone know of a company making such a thing? Alternatively, does
> anyone have a schematic of some home-grown version of this?

As Mr Paterson said, anything you use for this purpose is going to turn
the electrical power into light or heat - and if you don't want light, you
have to have heat!

I was in the situation a couple of months ago where I had some 110V
parcan pairs (in the UK, our 240V system means we only use 110V parcans in
pairs in series) where one half of the pair had to be removed from the
rig. I moved it up into our fly gallery and put a gel combination (I think
3 sheets of primary red and one sheet of congo blue - classic "block
everything apart from IR"!) into the gel frame. Pointing away from the
stage, it worked :-)

--
Andrew
.