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Shows in the rain


lstewartff

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As this is my first year using LOR and I am always worrying something is going to go wrong. I am wondering if doing a show in the rain will mess anything up when water gets into the plugs? It is raining here and if there is a chance that water in the connections will short something out I would rather shut it down for tonight. Thanks

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Many people here run Rain or shine, moonshine that is. There are a few things to make note of though.

Keep the connections off the ground. Clean water is not bad but dirty muddy water is much worse. Don't tape them up, just traps dirt and water in. 

Some  people use child proof caps on the ends but I don't

Use a GFI to protect yourself and your guests in case something shorts to ground.

If your GFI trips in a monsoon, that may be the signal to call it a night.

I have been running 8 years and not shorted anything out yet.(Knocks on Wood) My tomato cage mini trees do sometimes trip the GFI in very wet conditions.

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15 minutes ago, PhilMassey said:

Many people here run Rain or shine, moonshine that is. There are a few things to make note of though.

Keep the connections off the ground. Clean water is not bad but dirty muddy water is much worse. Don't tape them up, just traps dirt and water in. 

Some  people use child proof caps on the ends but I don't

Use a GFI to protect yourself and your guests in case something shorts to ground.

If your GFI trips in a monsoon, that may be the signal to call it a night.

I have been running 8 years and not shorted anything out yet.(Knocks on Wood) My tomato cage mini trees do sometimes trip the GFI in very wet conditions.

Words to live by

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My show runs rain or shine. Note that we're in year six of a drought, so rain has not been much of an issue. I only have six channels of AC powered light strings, and they are six feet off the ground, so GFCI trips are a complete non-issue for me. The only issue I tend to have is my pixel star leaks a little and the pixels sometimes go berserk when it rains. They are fine after they dry out, so by leaving the show running, the heat generated by them helps them stay dry or dry out if they get a little wet. My third year I had not re-applied the water repellent to the brick columns and everything inside one of them got wet. That shut me down for two days while I dried stuff out and re-arranged my E1.31 network around a LAN switch that failed (naturally it was the most expensive thing in there that failed). The 30 amp 12 volt DC power supply was fine after a good cleaning and drying, and despite how much so many people bitch about the Whole House FM Transmitter, it survived being drenched with dirty water, as did the Wi-Fi access point. From what I could tell, shortly after water started leaking in, the GFCI in the column tripped which turned off power to the DC power supply, WiFi, and FM transmitter (the LAN switch got power over the Ethernet cable from the garage, so it kept getting fed 48 volt power - I'm sure that's why it died). After that, I'm very diligent about re-applying the water repellent to the brick every year!

Sent from my Droid Turbo via Tapatalk, so blame any typos or spelling errors on Android

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Funny topic.

During Halloween I Han no problems with rain. I only had 32 Channels for the 4 singing pumpkins.

Since then we had no rain.

Ffwd to now, it's been raining all day and my lights tripped. All three controllers are connected to GFCI, going to leave them that way for everyone's safety.

For Christmas I have singing trees/ bulbs 4 each (I change them every other night) and then I have my third controller running mini trees and roof and other outline lights. And a singing Santa.

Next year more controllers to save me the time of switching between singing bulbs and trees. Will just mod my sequences.

All sound advice above. Since my lights tripped the GFCI I am just gonna be content with it being dark.

Safety is always first, it's all fun until someone or something gets hurt or worse. 

JR

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