History of Project
Marcia Cook decided to add a series of floating fountains with multi-color lights, to the small lake in front of their home in Butler, MO.  Marcia's background as a musician combined with her job as an IT Director, led to her desire to synchronizing the fountains and lights to a music broadcast. 

The basic design of the fountain was done by Marcia's husband - himself a general contractor.  While the design was straightforward, finding the components to allow the synchronization was a bit more difficult.  The key was finding pumps with asynchronous motors that could be controlled by basic dimmer switches.

Next, Marcia needed some method to control the pumps, lights and music for the project. Marcia's search ended when she found Animated Lighting's web site and contacted them directly.  The flexibility of Animated Lighting's light controllers, combined with their Animation Director software, gave Marcia all the piece's of the puzzle she needed to complete her project.

Marcia reports, "There was much trial and error in the original fountain designs, but we finally put the completed project out in the lake in late September 2005. We quickly found that our lake is too rich in nutrients, and the pump filters clogged within a few days.  Since the only way to service the fountains was to take a boat out into the lake, my dream of floating fountains quickly came to an end. Our son saved the project when he came up with the idea to build a fountain pond right at the edge of the lake. That area is mostly rock, so we enlisted the help of a friend with a skid loader, who also does network cable work.  Matt helped us out in moving huge native limestone rocks into position along the deep side of the fountain pond, and ran the network cable from the house to the area where we mounted the controllers."

Marcia continues, "After some initial experiments with the number of lights controlled per channel, and a lot of technical support help by the crew at Animated Lighting, I determined everything needed to be wired differently.  We planned to take the fountains out of the water the third weekend in December but a cold snap hit first.  After the cold snap, we took them out of the water and began the process of rewiring.  I used a lot more silicone this time, and balanced out the load per channel on the controllers.  We changed out some light fixtures, and changed all the halogen bulbs.  I also decided to expand from the original three fountains to five fountains and to add a fourth controller. I don't think I've ever been so determined to complete a project!  My family and friends thought I had really gone crazy trying to pull off something like this, but when they saw the finished product, they were completely amazed.  It's such a beautiful display during the day or night and I think it's safe to say it is very rare to see fountains of this size with these features in someone's yard.  I would never have been able to pull this off without the controllers, Monster Brain and help from Animated Lighting."