I've been reading through a lot of old threads about lighting and the general consensus seems to be on marine batteries as the best combination of power/portability for powering your setup.
However, most of these threads are several years old, and I was wondering if this is still the case now that low power LED lights have become so prevalent.
The Utah Arts Festival will be my first show and it runs for 10 hours each day, outside. About 2 hours of that will be after sunset so I'd be looking at powering a run of 5-10 five watt LED lights for at least the 2 hours, but would prefer to run them all day. Is this something that one of those portable power supplies would be able to run or is a marine battery still the way to go?
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Heck No,,,,Check out Silicon Lightworks,,,,,I had a guy at a show give me a flyer about what they have. I looked into it and purchased three of the light kits and they are awesome! Two lights run off a small lithium ion battery back that is about the size of an ipad. No more heavy batteries for me! The lights are bright and look awesome! Check out www.siliconlightworks.com
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I use a marine battery for some of my set ups and I use an Optima. They are expensive but they are the best.
Optima batteries used to be good until they outsourced everything to Mexico. All the newer batteries have not been as good as the older ones. I had the blue top and had issues with it.
I have rigged a marine battery setup based on the threads I've read here and it works really well; however to run all day you'd need multiple batteries. And they are HEAVY batteries, not much fun to transport. That said, I don't think we need battery setups for Utah Arts Festival; from the documentation in the first packet:
LIGHTING
The Festival will provide power, however our power sources are temporary & limited. Each booth is permitted 200 watts of total usage. Artists must provide their own lighting fixtures. Please consider using compact fluorescent bulbs which are very energy efficient and can be found at any hardware store. Twilight is 9ish, and bringing an emergency flashlight is a great idea.