Theatre Australia

your portal for australian theatre

Air Con & punters

Mon, 26 Oct 2009, 02:49 pm
JoeMc18 posts in thread

Just a thought, as the weather is warming up at day time Matinée, especialy if it has not been used for a while. A good idea is to run the system for while prior to opening the house, this allows the air return system filter to clean up the air. Especialy in very old buildings with open frame roof viod structures.

I went along to Garrick for the Sunday Matinée of Hotel Sorento, when I took my seat in the back row the ceiling fans were on, but as the show started they switch from fans to the ducted air con. Good idea as the bcollected heat of the punters started to rise, as most were from the blue rinse set it started to become cooler. Then about 10 minutes into the show the coughs & weezes started, brought on by the dust in the air & became like a mexican wave for a lot of the first half. By the end of the act the air return filters had caught up & scrubbed up the air & the coughs abated.

It's something to think about as we come into summer, especialy when considering our punters in preference to economy.

One thing which I though was quite specky was the blue light spill from the FOH bar lights. It was a great effect on the back of the heads of the front row punters. It realy set off the rinse in thier hair do's.

Also the ambient light coming from under the eaves of the roof into the auditorium, assisted the odd  punters going to the loo & helped the warm props moving around the set in the blue outs.

I only seen the first half, I enjoyed It & the set worked well!

Salt water dimmers

Fri, 13 Nov 2009, 07:17 am
Actually, in my day job, we still use a version of the salt water dimmer to this very day. When testing three phase gensets, we have three metal plates bolted together with insulators, that we lower into a drum of salt water. Makes it very easy to control the output current of the generator. At 100 amps, the water boils in fairly short time. Earlier this year, I also came across an old three phase motor soft starter - three saltwater pots. I didn't know what they were at first, but soon worked it out. One of the pots had run low on water. Topped it up, and it's back working for another 50 years. www.meltheco.org.au

Thread (18 posts)

← Back to Tech Talk