Outdoor power sources

[Deathwing]

For those of you doing outdoor shows like trails, corn mazes or hayrides how do you do your power? Do you use generators and if so are they the big rentals or your own spread out? Or do you ground power from nearest power source?

Thanks in advance!

Jake

[Scary Harry]

Power?

We use both, I own all my generators. Most of our power is hard wired. Our trail is roughly a mile long with each scene having its own power. We ran our power several years ago and cost around 10 grand, today you could probably add 20% to that.

[Deathwing]

I use generators like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/DuroStar-DS400...roStar+DS4000S

I have 2 to power my parking lights and 3 to power the woods trail. I converted almost all of my 110v lighting to 12v last year and can now run all my woods trail stuff on only 2. I also always have at least 2 spares that have been tested same day and are full of gas so if any one of them dies I can easy plug in the replacement in minutes. I love using cheap and easy to replace smaller systems: speakers, amps/mp3 players, lights, strobes, fog machines, and generators rather than buying more expensive big systems. New staff will ask why I don't just buy a bigger single generator. It's because I never want a single point of failure.

I've only been up and running for 3 seasons and it's worked out great so far. I've made two significant trail layout changes and I just move the generators to the most logical position out of the way.

I use to worry the load noise of the generators would be a distraction but they aren't. Last year we even had the customers walking right past the generator area and with only a little bit of sound suppression with walls the customers never even noticed due to well placed actor.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Do you have animatronics and compressors that run off these generators as well? Do you just roll them out each night you're open and lock up when closed?

Jake

[Deathwing]

We use both, I own all my generators. Most of our power is hard wired. Our trail is roughly a mile long with each scene having its own power. We ran our power several years ago and cost around 10 grand, today you could probably add 20% to that.

Scary, that seems reasonable at $10k-$12k. So you grounded power and you have outlet boxes provided for each scene then, so with this, you will pretty much always keep your scenes in the same spots then? So you're electrician pulled power from the nearest power source, in your case how far was that away from your trail?

Thanks,
Jake

[Scary Harry]

We put a service in and then ran direct bury to the scenes with sub boxes , roughly two scenes share the sub boxes . And yes our scenes are always in the same spot. We will run generators for our compressors or use gas powered compressors. Hope this helps.