Triac hangs on, too little current draw

[randallr]

I know I've seen this discussed, but can't find it.

I've added several Par36 Pin Spots. Very low current draw. Four on two controllers. One never has a problem. The other works fine sometimes, but others it was always had one spot hang ON. I moved it to a different channel, and it was fine all night. Now I've got two others hang every time in tonights test. I either have to power cycle the controller, or unplug the hanging circuit to get them to go off.

The spots have a transformer going to a 6V 30W bulb, so 1.5 Watt at 120v?

Was there some solution other than adding a bulb somewhere or a small relay?

Thanks,

Randall

[-klb-]

30W is 30W.. At 6V, it is 5A... At 120V, it is 0.25A.. I don't think the issue is the amount of current or wattage being switched by the channel. After all, the typical solution for too low a power load is to add a 7W load, and you already have 30W...

One thing I am not clear on is if your wall warts are truly transformers, or if they are the surprisingly common switching power supply ones.. Typically wall warts come in two flavors. Rather heavy ones that typically are transformer based, and fairly light, which are the switching power supplies.

Neither type is really a good idea to dim with LOR, but the switching ones could easily be killed by dimming with LOR.. In either style, even if they claim to be dimmable, they might not actually work right with LOR, but at least I would expect they would survive the attempt.

The transformer based supplies probably don't have many issues with LOR in an on and off state, but the switching ones may have an unbalanced inductance or reactance that can mess up the phase angle dimming. In fact a CF bulb can cause an entire LOR controller, and sometimes additional controllers on the same circuit to become on/off devices, incapable of dimming..

One solution would be a 20A, 6V DC power supply, and a DC card. The DC card would also need a 12V supply for the logic. With this year's cards, you would have to bridge two channels together for each light, but it should work..

As for simple solutions, adding a 120V lamp is one way to add some pure resistive load that may help cover issues from the wall warts. I don't have any simpler suggestions..

- Kevin

[randallr]

They are regular pin spot stage lights. They have a transformer inside their case. (Was a little too late in the day for my watt/amp thinking....)

We're not dimming them anyway, just on/off. I thought it's strange that one controller has the issues with them, but the other doesn't.

[cmoore60]

Do all of your controllers have the same firmware version. You can determine the firmware version by using the hardware utility and doing a search. The firmware version is returned to the HWU when the network is scanned.

Not knowing if your controllers are NEW within the last 2 years or not. If your problem controller has a green board, it could have an earlier version of firmware.

Chuck

[randallr]

Both version 4.02

Both were bought from the summer sale.

Later today, I am going to add a small light to the problem circuits to see if it's a load issue. I have a lot of circuits that have only one string of 100count minis, which is slightly more at .31 amps, and didn't have a single hanging issue like this last year.

I have several spares, so I may swap boards also.

Thanks,

Randall

[LightORamaDan]

Other than the load it may be the inductive nature of the transformers that is not allowing the circuits to shut down. In may causes if it is an inductive issue adding a small resistive load such as a C7 or C9 bulb fixes the issue.