Re: UK Wall dimmer reliability

[Keith Doxey <keith.doxey@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Tim,

I would imagine that the poor little X10 chip inside the switch is getting
cooked so much by the heat coming from the triac that it just stops
responding. Once cooled it will work OK until the next time.

I personally dont like running ANYTHING at 100% load. Its much better to
have a good safety margin.
If I want 500W of lighting I use a 1kW dimmer.
If I want 50 watts of audio playing I use a 200W amp with speakers rated at
3-400W

In the 17 years I ran a mobile disco the only faults I had were a few blown
triacs due to lamp failures in commercial lighting controllers.  8 amp
triac, cheap 5amp fuse running 1KW load. Repaired with a 16 Amp triac and
HiSpeed ceramic fuse that cost more than the triac and never had a failure
again even when an incorrectly wired light box that I borrowed proved to be
a dead short on the output of the controller.

Never blown an amp or speaker in my life. Still got my original disco
speakers which will be 20 years old in September and although the cabinets
are a bit tatty now they still sound great :-))

All the repairs I have done to amps, speakers and lighting controllers have
been due do overdriving or running at full load continuously. Most other
repairs to mixers were due to physical abuse or beer spilt into them. Apart
from wear on mechanical components like faders, buttons and switches,
electronic equipment should hardly ever fail. But the biggest killer of all
is EXCESS HEAT.

I suggest you try doing the same as Raymond and upgrade to LD10's to
control your lights.
How deep is the box your wall switch is mounted in?
Adding a spacer ring to the faceplate may improve the ventilation and air
circulation a bit and solve your immediate problem but I personally would
go for a higher capacity dimmer.

Hope that helps

Keith

Keith Doxey
http://www.btinternet.com/~krazy.keith
Krazy Keith's World of DIY Home Automation

From:	Raymond [SMTP:Reb.barnett@xxxxxxx]
I thought I had a faulty
controller. However I traced the fault to occurring when a 300W halogen
uplighter had been on for a while at a dimmed setting. My uplighter was
connected to a CM12U, which nominally should cope with 300W. However,
Andy of ISCAM systems doesn't regard the power handling of X10 modules
too highly, and recommended an LD10 which is rated to 700W. I swapped
the uplighter to one of these and the problem has not surface again. I
suspect that running the CM12U at 300W on dim for an hour or so stresses
it (heat?) and it started jamming X10 signals on the mains wiring.

The LD10 has the advantage of supporting memory dim which makes for much
smoother dim control, provided you've got the space to hide the module
away somewhere.

>
> 3 Wall switches, respond fine when cold, but if set at 50%
> for say 4 hours
> will not respond to any X10 signals. All the dimmers are
> controlling mains
> voltage halogen (dimmable) bulbs 300W on 2 of the circuits
> and 200W on the
> other. I should mention that I have a 4th dimmer controlling 300W of
> halogen bulbs which functions perfectly, on exactly the same
> spur as one
> which is erratic.
>
> All this in a small single storey 10m x 3m dwelling. All the
> mains sockets
> are on a single ring, and the lights are on 4 spurs.
>
> Any ideas?
>


------------------------------------------------------------------------
eGroups Spotlight:
"R2-D2 Builders Club"- A list for those interested in building
replicas
of R2-D2.
http://clickhere.egroups.com/click/528


eGroups.com home: http://www.egroups.com/group/ukha_d
http://www.egroups.com - Simplifying
group communications