HEAT

After a great deal of discussion, we decided to put a square of track lighting in our school loft, the largest room we have. This is a beautifully redone 1836 building, and the loft area contains classes, lectures, music and sometimes an auction. The architects had installed a single track, and had not considered that we light models, still life’s etc. from many sides and in many ways. While this alone would not be all the traditional lighting we might need, it would help greatly in providing controllable light source for the classroom.

When initially installed, it had a switch to turn it on. This would not do as we needed as much control as possible, so we switched to a controllable sliding switch for each side of the square.

The architects added side lighting for all the walls, a major effort, not anything we had planned, but not a bad idea.

When we considered the model, we had another concern. The models are often nude, and the large space, even redone, may prove to be a bit chilly in the winter. The answer was simple, and we installed four hanging fixtures of heat lamps.

The heat lamps will do their job and keep the model toasty warm, however, there seems to be two kinds of heat lamps. Basically it’s one for chicken coops and one for fries, burgers etc. The basic difference is that chickens’ usually are heated by red bulbs, and food, because it needs to look good, is heated by clear bulbs.

As you may have guessed, when we lit up the model with our elaborate lighting display, and then went to heat the model up, we discovered we had created the red model, bathed in a warm red glow and looking like a very large chicken!