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LOR Controlled Washing Machine


Eric R

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Turned on the lights in a test sequence today as I always do, went outside and walked the display replacing bulbs as needed. It was late morning and I wanted to beat the cold weather and wind moving in.

Came inside and my wife told me our washer had died. It is less than a year old (Frigidaire not that it really matters). Sure enough there was no display and it wouldn't respond, light up, nothing. Grabbed my DVOM and we had 116vac at the outlet. We decided to call in the morning since it might still be covered.

I went back into the office and shut down the test sequence. A few minutes later my wife came in asking if I had fixed her washer. Nope, I replied. Wait a minute... I turned the sequence back on and the washer blacked out. Turned the sequence off and the washer came back on. Cool eh? A LOR controlled washer.

I had always told her not to run anything while the display was running as we may blow the mains. Odds of that are not that great at 94 amps on a 150 amp service but it keeps her in check and prepared for next year. Needless to say we had never run our washer while the show was running and had never noticed what was going on.

I think maybe I should bring my scope home with me and see how bad the power quality really is on LOR. Anyone else have any good ideas?

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Regular minis for the entire display but I suspect the problem will be with either the two 750 watt strobes or the curtain strobes. I flash the 750's every second during the test and the curtains are on all the time.

Looks like the poor washer doesn't take noise well.

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If you have your lights full on, LOR should not be generating much noise.. If you have any dimming, either as intensity settings, or ramps/fades, even with incandescents, you will generate a lot of harmonics. It just goes with phase angle dimming.. We had issues with interference with a garage door opener here. Everything worked fine during the day, but at night, the remotes could not operate the door. This is even a pretty solid garage door receiver, with a remote antenna, and coax between the receiver and antenna. Note that many garage door openers are up in the 400Mhz range, so we are quite a number of harmonics up there to be interfering...

We wound up installing split core ferrites over the controller inlet cords that ran closest to the antenna, and one over the coax of the antenna, it it appears that the issues have been resolved.. You might try a couple of split core ferites on the washer cord, or a suitably heavy duty power filtering power strip. Some of the isobar units might have adequate power ratings, and pretty good filtering, but it probably won't be cheap...

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