April 27

 In Eurovision Diary 2018

Hey hey hey — it’s Powershop Day! Let’s find out what those crazy kids out back have been doing!

Here are our hosts this afternoon, Tom Delbaere, Tommy Kerckaert and Wouter Hallaert. They’re some of the very few that have seen regular sunshine these past weeks.

And here are the mugshots of Mark Rennocks and Rob Van Herk! The team of 5 plus 12 stagehands put this power world together.

And I guess mugshots are appropriate, seeing how the generator farm looks like a prison compound (a pretty one at least!) Safety first! Power comes from a total of 7 twin 400kVA generators (=14), putting out around 5 Megawatts of electricity per day. There are less than 15 people within the entire production team that have access to this area.

10 generators are dedicated to lights and 4 are dedicated to sound, video and broadcast. All engines run at half capacity at all times. If there is any failure in any of them, the load is automatically distributed evenly among the remaining generators.

Power first goes to the breaker panels……

Then through the distribution panels – one for lights, one for sound/video/broadcast. Each panel is 8000 Amps. We have 16 PD400 distribution panels and 61 various distribution panels (125A, 63A, 32A, …)

Then the nice neat cable runs in to the venue. We use a total of 37,85km of high voltage cable on this production – 29km single core cable power lock,
4,3 km multi core cable (125A, 63A, 32A, …) and 4,000 meters Earth cable. For you troglodytes that don’t understand the metric system, it equals to a hell of a lot of miles of it!

And ends up at this distribution hub, which leads to all the dimmers among others. Lighting alone consumes 854 000 watts!

Fun Facts:

Singlecore cable:

240# 2.650 m

150# 6.500 m

120# 20.400 m

Multicore cable:  4.335 m

Shucko cable:  4.000 m

Triplets: 400 pcs

PD 4000 A 2 pcs

PD 103 pcs

Cableramps 500 pcs

Earthcabling 2.000 m

Generators Twin 400kVA, 7 containers

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In other news I requested a bolero and somehow got a sombrero, here modeled by Brodd.

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And the press crew managed to catch me.

But now to the food fun for the day!!

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We started off early smoking suckling pig…

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Got some lovely Gouda cheese from our good friends at Ampco Flashlight. They are definitely keeping us well fed!

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Swedish meatballs at 4:00…..

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Then on to the pig!

 

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This is how I make my friends….

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But I know that a happy crew is a productive crew! So Christer and Andi, be happy NOW! Like Mattias! That is an order!

Clip of the day takes us 12 months back to Kiev. Set Design by Florian Wieder, Lighting Design by Jerry Appelt and Video Content Design by Falk Rosentahl and his brilliant team at Gravity.

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