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How do I do this?


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A relay is an ON / OFF device. You won't get any shimmer or fade out of it. If you try, the relay will just "chatter" and cause radio frequency noise and then burn out early. Not your desired intent.

Technically, what you need is a Current Amplifier, and a high wattage capable one at that. Looking on the net, I didn't find anything that made me say "Eureka!"

If you are up to the job electronically, you could just get a much higher rated Triac, mount it with its own heatsink and fused power supply and run the trigger/gate signal from the optoisolator over to the new Triac.

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Im surprised there's not an easy solution, out of the box for this in LOR. Im certainly not the only one who is running high voltage circuits all on one channel- think of the commercial displays out there. Certainly they dont buy HUNDREDS of channels just so that they can link them all together off across many channels, when all they need is 1-2 channels.

Doesn't LOR have an easy solution for this?

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RichardH wrote:

You can try and go the SSR method but you will not be able to dim, just off and on.

I had this same problem this year because my entire roof line takes 13 amps per color and I have 3 colors, Red, White, & Green which takes a total of 29 amps. I had to split it up on 6 channels, 2 channels per color so each channel was around 7 amps. What then gets tricky is you can only have 15 amps per side on a controller. If I put 2 of my channels from the roof on the same controller, I was at 14 amps and only had 1 more amp for 6 channels. I ended up only putting 1 roof channel per side of my controllers (I have 5 controllers) so I would have sufficient amps for the other channels.

This is very similar to my situation. I have 4 colors (rgbc) all C9's. So my plan at the beggining of the season was to have chanels 1-4 for each color and then use 9-12 for the other half. Well before I put all the C9's up I decided to go ahead and pop every other socket off the wire so my amps actually got cut in half. So now I can actually have them all on at the same time, when before I could only have two colors on at the same time.
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K,

First off keep in mind that all lights are C9's and that there is actually four runs of lights. One for each of the four colors.

Channel 1 is 1/2 my green lights, 2 is 1/2 my red lights, 3 is half my blue lights, and 4, is half my white lights. The other half of the lights are on channels 9,10,11 & 12. My original plan was to use normal 12" spaced lights and then when you add the other 3 colors the spacing would actually be 3" to the nearest next colored light. Well I soon discovered that the 3" was too close because you actually have to leave a little slack in the line to lay the lights like that, so the spacing is actually less. And then with the fact that the C9 bulbs are around an inch in diameter there only seemed to be between 1" - 1 1/2" from actually bulb outside to bulb outside. Way to close. So I decided to go ahead and pop every other light socket off of my strands so that from green bulb to green bulb is around 24" and from green to red is around 6".

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ok so I'm confused, and LOR tech support hasn't answered my emails yet...

My rooflines as of now use 23amps for one color. I plan on doing multiple colors. If 1 color uses 23 amps total- how many channels do I need, and how do I distribute this up? Figure I am using 3 colors total, each using 23 amps.

Thanks!

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