Hey guys, i have a question, allthough a little off topic as far as trains go, but alot of you guys are good with electricity so here goes.
Im sure when putting up Xmas trees alot of us guys string up 10 or more strands of lights together, as do I. I also have about 8 department 56 building that have light bumps in them with standart wall plugs that i end up stinging together as well. Now, in my apartment of course i dont have an outlet where i need it and have to run this all through an extension cord to another outlet.
How safe is this? I did it last year and am looing for a better way this year as i have added a few buildings. Should i be looing at getting a better extension cord???
Im kinda stuck as far as power goes… i end up usualy having to plug my xmas tree/derpartment 56 buildings/3 transformers/ and tmcc all into 1 walla outlet… and im sure this cant be good.
Does anone have any ideas to help me manage my power a little better???
I’m not sure on the loading thing, but I’ll off a little advice. LEMAX offers light strands with six bulbs per strand, which should cut down on the amount of plugs you have. Next, I’d usually run all my tree lights (no more than 4 100/150 bulb strands) to one socket, and a power strip (for my layout lights and transformer) to the other socket. Never experienced any problems.
We generaly run alot of lights… id say close to 900-1000 on our tree (lol, cant have too many lights ya know) Just asking cause i alwaysread on the little tags how your not suposed to string to many of them together… lol… 8 strands on lights plus 8 lightes houses becomes alot through 1 extension cord i think. Add that to a tmcc command base and three transformers through a single outlet really starts to worry me.
I bet you could cut bathroom tile on your electric meter during the holidays…YOWZA!
^^^^ in all reality, the power is nothing compared to some of the juice that members here put through their layouts. But at the same time, this is an apartment, and got knows how many outlets they have running through the same circuit here.
Alot of these guys running big power have one, or even two completly seperate circuits dedicated to just their trains. LOL… one day, one day …
http://www.planetchristmas.com
For all of your Christmas tree lighting questions!
^^^ wow, pretty cool site!!! I need to spend some time and go through it. Thanks for contributing!!!
—Joe
What I would recommend is using a heavy duty appliance extension cord rated for 15 amps as your main extension cord and make sure that you have fuses in all the light sets in the plugs or inline in the cords. Also a good power strip with built-in circuit breaker will help too, and you may want to use two(2) extension cords if using a lot of lights.
Another tip for holiday lighting is to use a timer or two so that you dson’t have to mess with turning on the power everytime for the lights.
Best type of lights for low power draw are the mini lights that have 30 to 100 on a string as they use less power than the old fashioned C-7’s or C-9’s as they draw 7 watts or 9 watts a piece depending on their number ratings, also they heat up more and lead to more electrical fires. Even rope lights are safer than the C-7 & C-9 style lights.
Don’t use the real old time lights, the Mazda lights by General Electric for your tree lighting needs, they are real dangerous unless you know a lot about wiring and expensive to power.
Lee F.
^^^ ahh, i think you game me a good idea… I can use a 6 outlet 15a circuit breaker/surge protector (whatever u call those power strips) under my tree skirt… to help me split up the extensive stringin together of plugs on the depertment 56 buildings… plug those and my tree lights into the surge protector, and then use a 15a extension cord…
sounds good to me… the tree area is just one place where u dont want any wires overheating or anything … could lead to trouble
An outlet with parallel slots is rated at 15 amperes. The maximum load that you are allowed to connect to it is however 80 percent, or 12 amperes. In the US but not in Canada, you are allowed to put 15-ampere outlets on 20-ampere branch circuits, but 12 amperes is still the maximum load allowed.
An outlet with a T-shaped slot (illegal in Canada) will accept either a 15-ampere or a 20-ampere plug (one blade rotated 90 degrees) and can legally supply a load of 16 amperes, 80 percent of its rating.
There is no benefit, beyond redundancy, to putting your own 15-ampere circuit breaker to a load plugged into a 15-ampere circuit, except for redundancy.
I would certainly not string strands of lights together beyond what the manufacturer allows.
You may want to put the two extension cords on separte circuits, one circuit breaker controlling a seperate outlet from the breaker box, you will need to see if you lose power to each outlet when the circuit breaker is turned off, the reason for this is that any good circuit breaker can not be pushed beyond its limits. This will require extra wiring but you will have a total of 30 amps to use at 120 volts instead of 15 amps, and you can split up your power load between two circuits instead of one.
Something that I would do is to use wiremold, a form of conduit,(needs to be mounted to the wall) to run the extra circuit from my breaker box as I am into electrical wiring; residential & light commercial, not into electronics.
One of the reasons to use fuses or breakers(surge protectors) besides in the breaker box is so that you can reset the lights without having to run to the breaker box every time you have an overload, also prevents power loss to other items such as a refridgerator or stereo unit if on that circuit.
Lee F.
http://www.planetchristmas.com/FigurePower.htm
Here is the link to their power page
Let’s run some numbers. A a 15amp circuit can take about 1440 W and each 150 mini lights is about 60 Watts and each building lamp is about 7 W. Assume we use a 15amp power strip to protect our 15 amp extension cord. Let’s also dedicate 300W to our train transformers. Let’s also assume two 150W light bulbs are on this same circuit.
That allows 1440W - 300W -300 W or 840 Watts for our display.
Assume 4 strands of 150 lights…that would be 240Watts.
Assume 10 Buidlings with 7W light bulb…that would be 70W more.
So a typically slightly large Christmas layout should be just fine. Total circuit load would be about 910Watts. The 15amp circuit can easily handle 1440 Watts.
So in general…if one has 20 amp circuits and they run 15amp circuit breaker power strips off of two different wall plugs and they run 15amp extension cords they should have no problem.
But of course, there are no gaurantees in life. Your mileage might vary so check out the web site and do the calculations yourself.
Jim H
P.S. With all the combustable material in our temporary layouts (thinking foam and white fabric and possibly a live tree) we should be VERY careful with electrical connections around the layout.
P.S.S. Oh yeah…NEVER LEAVE A TRAIN SET POWERED UP UNATTENDED FOR MORE THAN A BRIEF MOMENT. There are enough watts available that when a (admittedly rare) slow short happens you can get a fire. It has happened once or twice at our train club during 2500 hours of multiple trains running.