Profilux II plus aquarium controller

[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

[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

[MNSPS]

Matthias,

Will the firmware 3.00 be available by February? Also, could you give me any more details in regards to the new dosing funtionality included in the 3.00 release?

Thanks in advance for your assistance,

Chris

[bullit67]

Jason

If it was the programing the LED indicator would not go out it would stay on to indicate that the outlet still has power I dont know about every one else but on mine the LED goes out. am sure we will come up with a solution sooner or later

Doug

[niloc16]

the led goes out on mine as well even though the lighting is still on. so it cant be a programming issue because the controller has sent a signal to the powerbar which opens the relay and turns off the led. when i do fix it, i can hear the relay close again. it has happened with metal halides and t5's. i've heard today that when other controllers first came out and released in north america there was similiar issues with the power bars. i'm assuming it has something to do with the conversion to 110v

[Matthias Gross]

let's summarize:
bullit67: the LED and socket work simultanesly, but they don't do what you expected. Maybe the wrong settings. If you can't solve this you can send me your configuration files (save Profilux's config with ProfiLuxControl), tell me what exactly you want to do and what the problem is. I'll have a look onto your settings and find the problem.
niloc16: LED and socket don't work simultanesly - we have an inrush current problem.
I had a discussion with an engineer of the manufacturer of the relays. He told me that the relays have the best available contact material for switching high currents. The limit is 120A for 20ms. If this is exceeded the contacts become to hot while switching, the contacts glue together. Because USA/CD only have 110V the currents are usually 2 times higher than in Europe, so an overload condition can be reached faster.
Devices with high inrush-currents are: Transformers, ballasts, switching power supplies, large electro motors. Good devices usuallay have an inrush-limiter included to protect switches or fuses of the power supply. But some of them do not - and they could cause this trouble.
Solution:
1. if possible use inrush current limiters (so called ILC) for your application when there are problems
2. I decided to ship the next generation of powerbars (the digital ones) with buil-in ICLs. Four channels will be protected (disadvantage of them: 8A permanent current), 2 channels will have full 15A and are not protected.
The powerbars have been redesigned, production starts today.

[Matthias Gross]

@mnsps:
The firmware will be available this month, the new ProfiLux shipped to Proline will allready have the 3.00

Firmware 3.00 will have some new controlling features.
Besides the standard controlling mode (switching with hysteresis) we added new modes. Now are proportional controllers available with adjustable pulse/pause times.
It is too much and too complicated to explain this detailled here so please have a look to the new manual - we added some pages in it! The translation will be available soon, i will post when the download is possible.

[niloc16]

so can we trade in our old power bars for the new ones? i apologize for not knowing electrical theory well but if these new bars with ILC will only carry 8A each continous will that still power 400w halides? why is it a disadvantage to only have 8A per outlet?