Shorting Bizzzzzzzzzzzzt

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   Remember that freezing fog and black ice well from 6 yrs living in England. We get some here but no where near what they get 'over the pond'.

For us here in Eastern PA looks like sleet and snow event coming tonight .  We're about 50% LED here.  The full wave m5 greens from Holiday Light Express have been excellent. The LED ropes from eBay have also been excellent (~550 ft., 4 colors). The Home Depot, Lowes, K-Mart strings have all been performing well too - No real issues other than the difference in ramps that one would expect to see between minis and LED.  The only ones I'm not 100% happy with are whites from Sams Club.. Fades were almost nonexistant until I flashed firmware 1.15 on that controller which seems to have improved them somewhat.. Doesn't seem to matter what the atmosphere throws at us LED's seem to be the same wet, dry, warm, or cold.. 

Now I wish I could say the minis have all been good..  GE pro (slightly larger bulb) reds been losing half a string on some of the mini trees.

Shouldn't have anymore 3-4 inch deep deposits of water now that a large drain hole (size of hammer head ) got punched into the device that was accumulating water, and the forgotten wire tie has been installed to prevent a plug from falling in and becoming submerged.

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bdkeen Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Beta Testers Joined: 31 Dec 2007 Location: Easton,PA Online Status: Offline Posts: 380	Quote Reply Topic: Shorting Bizzzzzzzzzzzzt Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 3:54pm
	Remember that freezing fog and black ice well from 6 yrs living in England. We get some here but no where near what they get 'over the pond'. For us here in Eastern PA looks like sleet and snow event coming tonight . We're about 50% LED here. The full wave m5 greens from Holiday Light Express have been excellent. The LED ropes from eBay have also been excellent (~550 ft., 4 colors). The Home Depot, Lowes, K-Mart strings have all been performing well too - No real issues other than the difference in ramps that one would expect to see between minis and LED. The only ones I'm not 100% happy with are whites from Sams Club.. Fades were almost nonexistant until I flashed firmware 1.15 on that controller which seems to have improved them somewhat.. Doesn't seem to matter what the atmosphere throws at us LED's seem to be the same wet, dry, warm, or cold.. Now I wish I could say the minis have all been good.. GE pro (slightly larger bulb) reds been losing half a string on some of the mini trees. Shouldn't have anymore 3-4 inch deep deposits of water now that a large drain hole (size of hammer head ) got punched into the device that was accumulating water, and the forgotten wire tie has been installed to prevent a plug from falling in and becoming submerged.


LightChristmas Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Beta Testers Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Location: Equality, IL Online Status: Offline Posts: 993	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 3:06pm
	Like freezing rain, but much more insidious. Take a dense fog, then freeze it. Creates black ice on the roads almost instantly - as one of our newsies found out when they hurried out to do a story about hazardous driving conditions; and put one of our news vehicles in a ditch a few hundred yards from the station. Guess they can save the trouble of finding an accident now and report themselves.


Pony_God Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Senior Member Joined: 01 Sep 2008 Location: Naples, FL Online Status: Offline Posts: 551	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 2:13pm
	So does that mean that you can cut the fog with a knife? We don't have any puddles, ground down here is all sugar-sand so it has to be pretty well saturated to make puddles. Now that I have a bit of time tonight, if everyone's glowing I'm going to measure and record for a dry day. I need to look at #10 because of the GFCI anyway, look for an errant wire fray near ground.
	Fine. You're so smart you rig up the lights. D-Light users Unite!

LightsOnLogan Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 11 Oct 2007 Online Status: Offline Posts: 3187	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 2:07pm
	Freezing fog?? Can't say I've ever experienced that combination! It is interesting how meterological terms vary a bit depending on where you are at. I recently was somewhere where the official NWS report included a "drizzle mist". I had never heard of a "drizzle mist" before! My understanding was that drizzle is scientifically quantified as rain which is less than 1/50 inch in diameter (I know, who's got the ruler out), and that mist is more of a fog (I'm not sure of the distinction between mist and fog). At least that is how it is used here. I guess a "drizzle mist" is drizzle happening while it is foggy? Edited by LightsOnLogan - 16 Dec 2008 at 2:08pm


LightChristmas Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Beta Testers Joined: 15 Oct 2007 Location: Equality, IL Online Status: Offline Posts: 993	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 1:49pm
	You might get your wish tonight. We're getting freezing fog here right now.


LightsOnLogan Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Admin Group Joined: 11 Oct 2007 Online Status: Offline Posts: 3187	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 1:40pm
	As I reported elsewhere, the glitches on my CDI LEDs greatly increase when it gets wet out. There is one purple channel that is particularly bad whenever it rains. Fog seems to be the worst offender though. I haven't taken any measurements when the lights are doing this (standing in a water puddle in the rain while moving plugs around to check circuits with a DMM doesn't sound safe or even remotely desireable to me). Maybe if we get some fog again I'll meter it.


Pony_God Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Senior Member Joined: 01 Sep 2008 Location: Naples, FL Online Status: Offline Posts: 551	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 8:23am
	With all of the rain, have any of you noticed that your LEDs are more on than normal? We usually have a 2% glow, but with the rain/humidity there are some strings that are about 80-90% on. I did not happen to measure the few channels that were leaking the 1-2VAC before to see if there is more of a leak yet. As for GFCIs, we have one hat hates humidity. Trips as soon as the B side goes in. Now, on that controller, every time that it's plugged in, there is a spark, of course, that's quite odd, since there ground is compleately seperate and cannot touch anything since we use the heatsink as the ground-bar. I have not opened him up to look yet because I didn't really want it to rain INTO the controller box, but will probably take a quick look when it's light and dry out. See if there's a single errant wire from a crimp that's raoming free.
	Fine. You're so smart you rig up the lights. D-Light users Unite!

bdkeen Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Beta Testers Joined: 31 Dec 2007 Location: Easton,PA Online Status: Offline Posts: 380	Quote Reply Posted: 16 Dec 2008 at 7:31am
	Yeah, rain again last night .. I've been back on the GFCI breakers and didn't have any problem after replacing, removing, and rerouting some wires, plus elevating plugs that I suspected might be a cause of the GFCI trips. No trips last night but did lose 1 channel on 1 controller. But when I discovered that the business end of a rope light was submerged in about 3 inches of water that had built up - I'm not surprised at the channel loss.. Most likely took out a triac. Fortunatly it's a channel that was sort of spare and not driving any major display item. Needless to say drain holes were made in the display item that trapped the water to help prevent the water build up.


Jonathan Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Beta Testers Joined: 07 Sep 2008 Location: SoCal Online Status: Offline Posts: 1237	Quote Reply Posted: 15 Dec 2008 at 11:44pm
	I posted this over on D-Light's site, but since we are on the subject, I too got hit by that same storm... Wow, what a night it's been. It rained here today, quite a bit in fact. The local mountains got 3 feet of snow out of the storm. Down here all we got was soaking wet, and that's where it all began... I got home and checked my lights. All was well except one firefly strand was dead. Turns out the power supply got wet and won't work. I guess my safe dry spot for it was anything but. I only figured this out when it shocked me. Funny thing was that my GFCI didn't trip. Thankfully, 12VDC is a lot less than 110VAC! (Been there, done that!) So I added my inclement weather spiel to the sequence list in a few spots that apologizes for lights not working and kept on truckin'. I went out a bit later to see that one of my ACx16's was blinking, as was the status LED on the wiLink remote. I power cycled, no change. Not wanting to interrupt the show, I ran a CAT5 cable from that box to another ACx16. All was well again until... I saw one channel on my mega tree sticking on. Hopefully the triac didn't die on me; I'm no good at fixing that kind of stuff. I went outside only to discover that two more fireflies were also now dark as was the problem ACx16 and my DCx16. Ignoring the stuck channel, I quickly figured out that a tripped GFCI was to blame for the other issues. I reset it, and it stayed on, so I left it at that. Turn out I got about 5 minutes worth before it tripped again. Reset, same thing. Finally, I killed the scheduler, had the HW Utility turn on power to everything that could see it, and played my technical difficulties soundtrack while I quickly built a new show with inclement weather spiels after each song, then started it all back up again. To isolate what was causing the GFCI to trip, I ran an extension cord to a different GFCI outlet and powered just the ACx16 and the DCx16 with it, and I left the fireflies on the outlet that kept tripping. So far neither have tripped, but it's only been half an hour. The bad news is that the forecast is rain, rain, and more rain for the next few days. At this rate the only thing I'll be playing by that time is my "show canceled" sequence. Oh well. I guess you can only do so much. Hopefully things will get better sooner than later!
	~Jonathan

Slinkard Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List DMX Joined: 10 Dec 2007 Location: El Cajon CA Online Status: Offline Posts: 243	Quote Reply Posted: 15 Dec 2008 at 9:44pm
	Becuase I talked about you guys moving to SD, Karma caughtup to me. Been raining bad here and windy. My 6 foot twig tree's fell over so I went to put them back up and bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! yep got a good shock. I thought if the systems boards where not running power would not be going to the tree's. NOT THE CASE! not a huge shock but those tree's will be down until a sunny day dry's them out. Thats what I get, Slink
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