Strand Fail

A while ago, I filed a work order with our maintenance department to have a few of our house light bulbs replaced. A large section of lights in the balcony section had appeared to have burned out leaving a whole seating section in the dark. You can imagine my surprise when the maintenance employee walks into my office to inform me that all of the bulbs in those particular fixtures are fine. So Wes and I took a walk back to the dimmer room only to find that the entire dimmer module powering that section had destroyed itself. You can tell by the damage to that pack below, that and unbelievable amount of current had arced from the hot connection on the pack. (rated for 40 amps continuous)



After further inspection of all three dimmer racks, we have found that not just some, but ALL the packs in our installation (144 Dual 2.4kW dimmers) have the exact same manufacturing/installation defect that lead to this problem. The problem is this: every packs' hot and neutral connections are loose, causing a poor connection to the fixed connection in the rear of the dimmer rack. This should have been corrected upon installation, however our installation contractor, PARLIGHTS, whose name is now and forever will be synonymous with FAIL, didn't care when they simply unboxed each module and slammed them carelessly into the rack.

However, not to let parlights take the fall for all of this, STRAND, (whose name will also be synonymous with FAIL) is just as much at fault. Strand has several epic design flaws at work here. I won't go into too much detail here or I will most likely be here until next week and drive my blood pressure to unsafe levels. But in short, it would appear that everything with strand's name on it was designed by someone with only half a brain cell to devote to designing these units. The rack processors cannot even process a basic DMX or Outlook/SWC signal at times.

In summary, if you have strand gear, get rid of it ASAP. If you do not own any strand gear but own ETC instead, pat yourselves on the back and rejoice. And never, ever, under any circumstances, buy anything from parlights or strand as it will rapidly become the bane of your existence as it has become mine.