Profilux II plus aquarium controller

[Matthias Gross]

@honkey sauce: What are Actinics? Metal halide lamps? (i am still learning English).
Do i understand you correctly: LEDs follow the settings you made but the socket's power is not switched simultanesly to the LED?

[niloc16]

ok matthias have more info on the power bar problem. are you getting sick of hearing from me yet. anyway, tonight i had the problem again with lighting staying on but this time all 3 metal halides stayed on. the leds for these sockets were out. the only way i can get it to reset is change the outlet to 'permanent' and when i save this change i can here the relay click and the led comes on. now this proves that the relay was open otherwise i would not hear it close when i changed the outlet to permanent. so why then did the lighting stay on? only after i again change the outlet from 'permanent' back to the appropriate clock timer did the lighting go out because the settings were to have the lighting off.

actinics are just blue lighting fluorescent bulbs. mine are t5 lamps i'm not sure what honkey sauce are but actinics is just the blue bulbs used to simulate dawn and dusk

[jrm99]

First thing I would like to say is Matthias you and your company have come up with an amazing product and I'm really excited about some of the new features you talk about.

I am also having a problem with the sockets staying on when the lights are set to go off. The LED on the power bar does go off. Tapping doesn't cause the socket to turn off. The easiest way I found to turn off the MH lights is to go to Manual Light Intensity increase it to above 0% and then back down to 0% and the MH shuts off. I have done this about 3-4 times and the light has never stayed on when it shouldn’t.

My lights are 250 Watt MH with IceCap 250MH ballasts each on their own socket. I have had both stay on and one or the other stay on as well.

One thought is that it may be due to heat as the ballasts are mounted right beside my Profilux power bar. I have added a small LED light to one of the empty sockets to see if it also fails to turn off. This is an intermittent problem which is one of the hardest to troubleshoot but I'll post anything I find to help so we can solve this and let Matthias worry about getting new stuff out.

[Matthias Gross]

niloc16, thanks for the detailled information. I think i'm sure about what's happening. The extremely high inrush current heats up the relay contacts at the moment of closing. Then they are "glued" and can't open when they should open. Another impulse (permanent on/off) jiggles the contacts and they are again free.
Why does this happen now in Canada while in Europa not even one of several thousand powerbars has this problems?
Probably the inrush current is 2x higher as in Europa because the coils resistance is only the half (you have only 110V, we have 230V).
The problem could be solved with inrush current limiters which are integrated in the powerbars. The disadvantage of these limiters would be that you could "only" get 8A permanent current out of a socket which is protected by an limiter.

My question:
Is it OK to have sockets with full power (15A) but not beeing suitable for inductive loads AND sockets for inductive loads (with high inrush current) at 8A?
I thought about the new digital 6plug powerbar we just started to produce: 4 x 8A + 2 x 15A (of course in sum only 15A because your household can only deliever 15A).
Would this be OK? Or any other suggestions?
@jrm99: Thanks a lot for your commendation and your information about the "switching problem". As you can read above i think we found the reason and we will solve it soon.

[honkey sauce]

i have 4 250w MH plugged into one clock timer outlet and yet it has never stuck.now why would flouresent lights do that when they dont have a start up surge.

Besides that everything else is working mint and the Tunzes I hooked up are sweeeet.So many current settings!!!


ITS A NICE!

[bullit67]

The Lights I had the problem with staying on were also Power Compact florecents no problems with my any of the 3 250 watt MH. For now the problem seams to of corrected it self it hasnt done it for a few days now

Doug

[Matthias Gross]

Fluorescent do have ballasts and they cause a start up surge.
But usually this surge peak is not high enough to damage anything.
Can you please tell me the ballast type?

Switching of electronic ballasts (as for the T5 and T8) made never before a problem. We produce dimmable lighting units which include relays for switching on/off the lamps. Last year we sold about 1500 dimmable lamps and we never had a problem with a defective relay. So i wonder what the difference is in your cases. We use only Osram (in USA/CD: Sylvania) ballast in our lamps.

[support@proline]

Matthias
Thank you for all your support in our forum.
I am really puzzeled myself as the units that we used have never acted up this way.
I am not sure what the problem is but not everyone is experiencing this ,I think it might be a problem with install & or setting choice.
I am going to also ask Marc tomorrow in regards to this as well.
I know he has 3 powerbars & they are all operational.
I will keep you posted

[honkey sauce]

Originally Posted by Matthias Gross

@honkey sauce: What are Actinics? Metal halide lamps? (i am still learning English).
Do i understand you correctly: LEDs follow the settings you made but the socket's power is not switched simultanesly to the LED?

exactly