Electricity 101

Our stake is getting ready for a Youth Musical, and, as usual, I have been asked to help with the lighting. The stage has some minimal lights but a terrible system for controlling them. Basicall, it's a set of light switches in back of the curtain. For any theater buffs in the crowd, you know that you can't run a show from behind the curtain, so I set out to design a way to run the lights from a set of dimmers with the controls located in the back of the cultural hall, where the operator can see what he is doing.

It was simple. Cut into the cables going to each circuit and put a plug on it so that we could plug them into the dimmers. Sounded easy. I asks Art, my brother-in-law to help. $150 later, and two days it was done. Here is how simple the process was.

Build a simple set of three way switches mounted in tandem boxes.

Locate the wires leading into the switches and tap into each one.

Cram it all back into the box that never was designed to hold even half of it. Nice to have a professional helping me. Piece of cake.