The National Museum of Scotland re-opened last weekend after months of refurbishment.

It was a great pleasure to have a small part in this huge project which is so important to Edinburgh and Scotland.

This photo was taken on one of my early site visits and shows the grand main hall with a huge central scaffold during the refurbishment works.

If you follow the link below you will see what it looked like at the opening this weekend.

I was able to assist the guys at Balfour Kirkpatrick with the theatrical lighting in the 200 seater Lecture Theatre which was also fully refurbished as part of the project.  Working with Thomas Silk who is now working with Haden Young.

BBC – National Museum of Scotland to reopen after £47m refit

Lighting Controls systems installed at St Andrew’s Cathedral Glasgow and St Columba’s in Oban held very different challenges in commissioning but both very rewarding projects to be involved with.

The system in Oban involved DALI ballasts for all the high level lighting allowing changes to the addressing to be made without the need for expensive access equipment.

The Glasgow site as you can see from the photos below has a huge mix of types of lighting to spectacular effect and included four controllers spread over the cathedral building to balance loading correctly.

Tech Blurb:

Oban: The control system is an Edin NPU controlling evolution control packs and an Edin Universal ballast controller with a number of plates controlling lighting scenes and contactors to the huge St columba’s bells shown above.

Working on a recent project I came across these interesting transformers.

They allow connection of lov voltage lighting at greatly increased distance from the transformer while maintaining an optimum voltage.

The system uses a sensing cable which provides a feedback loop (similar in concept to those used in analogue sound processing) to monitor the lamp voltage and voltage drop in the cable and hence compensates for any variation and stabalises the lamp voltage.

The box itself houses a large transformer at the top with an electronic controller below. The units provide luxury service to the halogen lamps giving improved brightness, better colour rendering, longer lamp life and lovely smooth dimming.

The units can be controlled by 1-10v and 0-10v control as standard with DSI and DALI versions available.

These transformers hark back to the old days of centralised transformers but without all the cooper! They offer an alternative to leading edge dimming systems and provide a great solution.

More details:

Multiload

Be sure to check out the MLC2500 Lamp conserver product from the same manufacturer.