Reduced Wiring Cost By Shared Neutrals
Because shared neutrals often cause problems when run upstream of dimmers, the idea of locating the dimmer as far downstream as possible reduces wiring costs by allowing shared neutrals to be run all the way up to and including the dimmer.
The one form of (much copied) distributed dimming is the Rosco 6-dimmer bar that is supplied by a 3-phase 20-Amp circuit, usually connected to an L21-20 receptacle.
As a conservative measure, the 6-dimmer bar usually comes wired with 10-gauge (although 12 gauge would be enough for 20Amps) wire, having a common (shared) neutral, and three hot wires, plus a ground (5 conductors in total, including the ground).
A shared neutral wire, such as "10/4" (10 gauge, 4-conductor, not including ground), runs to an L21-20 receptacle into which the dimming bar is plugged in.
On the dimming bar, there are six duplex receptacles, each one fed from an individually controlled (by way of DMX512) channel. The first and fourth outlet are on the first phase, the second and fifth on the next phase, and so-on, so that the phases are interleaved.
Another devices are made by "Entertainment Technology" (who do a sinewave dimmer version), Botex, Showtec's "multidim", stairville's power-bar and eurolite.
Read more about this topic: Distributed Dimming
Famous quotes containing the words reduced, cost and/or shared:
“Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)