SW5548 AND DIMMERS [RE-wrenches]

[sunwise]

Keith Wrote:
The situation occurred last week where the incandescent
dimmers and some of the low voltage dimmers started oscillating. They
would act like disco lights.

Greetings Keith,

While I am not familiar with these dimmers, I've had situations where
some loads suddenly start experiencing problems with an SW's output.  In
some cases this is the result of the loss of one of the three
stages/transformers that the SW uses to achieve a sine wave.  The
inverter might act fairly normal, but what you end up with is more of a
modified square wave output, which many more devices are sensitive to.

This may not be what is happening in your case but a pretty easy check
is to use a Digital meter that is NOT a true RMS meter to measure
voltage on the SW.  If you have this problem, the inverter voltage will
read quite low (80-90vac?) while a true RMS meter will typically show a
more normal voltage on the same inverter.

Kurt Nelson



-----Original Message-----
From: keith [mailto:kcronin at lava.net] 
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 11:12 AM
To: RE-wrenches at topica.com
Subject: SW5548 AND DIMMERS [RE-wrenches]

Hello wrenches

I have a fairly large system on a fairly large house. 2- SW5548's, 4.4KW
Siemens, 44- Concorde 8D's.  My clients 15,000 plus square foot house
has been growing over the last 3 plus years. We have created a duplicate
(paralleled) emergency wiring infrastructure for loads that would be
operated in an outage.
The new twist is he decided to purchase these electronic dimmers made
from Leviton.  They are the "Mural" style MD101 with a master/slave
designation.  The situation occurred last week where the incandescent
dimmers and some of the low voltage dimmers started oscillating. They
would act like disco lights.  The lights would kinda flicker.  I spoke
to Xantrex and got a potpourri of answers depending upon who picked up
the phone.  I realize the SW is a synthesized "Mayan" pyramid, 52 step
unit and perhaps the dimmers like clean power.  They recommended I
install a 80 micro farad capacitor to choke the signal.  Well, it worked
for a little while last night till I created a lava flow/ firecracker.
It seems perhaps the 88 microfarad's that I picked up from Grainger
weren't large enough.
I was also told by Xantrex that with a master/slave dual SW5548 scenario
that perhaps when the customer has an outage that "technically"
whichever unit starts up first would be considered the "master"and could
be causing this to occur.  Is there any truth to this?

Any ideas on this complex situation?

Keith Cronin
Island Energy Solutions
318 A Kuulei Road
Kailua, Hawaii 96734
808-262-3268 Tel
808-263-0338 Fax
www.islandenergy.net

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