Electrical power spreadsheet

[Al in Raleigh]

Here is a spreadsheet that Rick Williams wrote or so I believe. Regardless, the spreadsheet is very informative and valuable. It could keep you from blowing up your electronics.

You can put in up to 10 controllers using the sheet tabs at the bottom. I have filled out a few controller sheets to show you some capabilities. If you overload a controller, bank, or channel it will tell you so. The light inventory sheet has most of the lights that you will use.

When I freeze my channel configuration for the year, I print this spreadheet out and carry it around with me during the display's installation and during maintenance. If you have many channels you can count on blowing up a couple. When you do blow up a channel you then can move the channel to another controller and have the information on hand to determine if the new channel can handle the load.

Al

[mschell]

I never blow up channels - at least I don't do that anymore. I did mess up things a few times early on - like 3-4 years ago, but now I use a similar spreadsheet to total the power requirements when I lay out the channels and controllers. That way, I don't ever overload a channel.

It was even more important when I was purchasing commercial controllers from Animated Lighting (AL). At $200-250 per controller, you didn't want to blow up a controller. Now with the DIY controllers from DLA costing only $55-70 per 16 channels, it's not as important, but I'd rather not move channels after I've sequenced them...

[Al in Raleigh]

Do you swap out the controllers? I blew up 2 channels last year with only 100 light minis attached. The controllers were new too. Either the triacs were faulty or the rain shorted out the extension cords. It did rain very heavily last year several days. GFCI trips were a problem.

I must agree, I avoid changing channels due to the overall number of programs effected.