[SML] turning off light boards

[Mike Voytko]

We shut down our consoles (Gio, Ion, Express) every night; our spaces are
small, and booths are within easy reach. Dimmer racks stay powered up to
avoid wear on the disconnects.

Our Obsession 1s would occasionally forget their show info when turned off
for a few weeks (or sooner, if due for a new logic board battery or
capacitors). The manual even specified that the desks should be run for at
least 7 hours every 28 days to avoid memory loss. Reloading a show file
from the hard disk was not a big deal, but reconfiguring DMX port settings
was a bit annoying--if the port settings didn't match those in the show
file, the desk would dump all dimmer doubling info from the patch.

The last time I recall being warned about not powering down a hard disk was
in the early '90s; seems the first generation of 1GB drives were more
vulnerable to suffering a stiction-related failure than smaller models
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction

--
Mike Voytko
Lighting & Sound Supervisor
TSOA Theatrical Production
New York University
mv35 at nyu.edu

On Nov 23, 2015, at 10:36 PM, Richard John Archer via Stagecraft <
stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:

Was visiting someplace (a college) a while ago  and they often left their
board on during the rehearsal and run of a show.....yes 24/7 for about two
weeks.   Is there some reason for this?  I've seen it done with special
events that were a few days but nothing  usually this long.
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