My LGB Garden Railroad is running real good these days using the DC power. The Malibu lights located in the garden shine brightly and work perfectly using low voltage Malibu transformer.
Can I attach my building lights, normally 110v, to the Malibu light circuit? The building lights are fancy night lights inside the wood buildings.
We use 12V batteries [deep cycle] to run lights [just like 110V] in floating houses at Fontana Lake. Your Malibu transformer might not stand the Amperage.
Buck, do you mean can you hook up the 110V bulbs to the low voltage? If so, they won’t do much, if anything. The low voltage is not enough “pressure” to make the filament glow. The bulbs from Christmas lights might work in your buildings.
The transformer you describe is probably a class 2 wiring… 16 volts or so used for doorbells and the like. 110 volt circuits like the night lights require better wiring to be safe and depending on your location may need thick wall conduit for outdoor use. Rather than go through all that you can pick up sockets at Radio Shack and replace the 110 volt bulbs with low voltage types. As you add to the system you might find you’ll need a second transformer, depending on how many buildings you have.
Elliot is right, if we both understand what you mean, Buckey. However, Christmas lights are often meant for 2.5 or 3.5 volts. Since the string is meant for 120 volts, you can use one-tenth of it on 12 volts. For example, a 70-lamp set probably has two strings of 35 lamps each. You could put 4 of these in series across the 12 volts.
Another possibility is automotive lamps, which are virtually all meant for 12 volts. There are of course suitable easy-to-find miniature lamps, such as the 14.4-volt number 53, that would work fine. It is a good idea to run the lamps on a somewhat lower voltage than they are rated for, if they are at all difficult to replace, so that they will last longer.
One other little piece of information, the bulbs in the houses and buildings flicker like a wood fire is burning inside.
Buckeye,
You are stuck with the 110V circuit for the “flicker” lights you described. Those are neon gas lamps and the neon requires a high voltage (> 90 volts) to cause the plasma for the orange glow.
Regards,
Roy
That’s what I thought. No juice, no flicker. [:(] They look so cool with flickering orange glowing lights inside.
Buck, if these are specialty bulbs that require 110 V, then you have the wiring problems that Trigtrax mentioned. There are also safety issues associated with the use of house voltage outdoors. Those night lights probably aren’t meant to be used like that, even though they look cool.
If you use these, you are probably operating outside the realm of the UL listing for which they are approved.
How many of these do you have? I suppose it would be OK to plug an extension cord into a GFCI outlet to run them, however you shouldn’t bury the cord. The one major hang up I see is that there is no good way to daisychain them together, meaning you would end up with a cord running to each building.
I think you may be better off going with the low voltage methods Bob has suggested.
Actually, with Christmas approaching, you may want to do a little poking around. You may be able to find some combination of outdoor rated bulbs and sockets to give you the effect using low voltage. Color is easy, the flicker is going to be the tricky part.
As near as I can Google, the Malibu lights run on 12 volts AC. One possibility is to use a small filament transformer, like the 300 mA Radio Shack 273-1385 at $4.29 to get 120 volts from 12 at the model. The transformer should be sized for the load. This transformer can handle .3 * 12.6 = 3.78 watts. There will be about 115 volts at the high-voltage winding of the transformer; so you should take extra care in insulating and protecting it.
Since you mention that they are 110 Volt Flicker lights I will give you the bad news.You’ll need to run the thick wall buried with out door type weather resistant boxes coming up that you can plug into.
Before you do that visit a hobby shop that deals in Doll Houses they may be able to help you with some low voltage gizmos. Other than that Radio Shack has little engineering note books you might be able to substitue 555 timers and circuits that would give a similar effect.