Hi All
Was done debugging my Smart Strings today.
They are the old version 1 type that weren't watertight at all.
I have nursed them along, and plan on giving up and just putting them in vinyl tubing next year.
First, on one SSC I had a short, and after much trial and error, found that the short was evidently within the black molding of the female RJ45, seemed odd but whatever. Edit: To clarify the pic, i actually had to cut into the black to find the charred section.
During the rest of my debug process I noticed something.
Of my 5 strands of 128, 3 had a resistance between red and green of ~950 ohm.
1 had a dead short, which I found, and then half of the rest of the strand had a resistance between green and red of about 6.5 kOhm.
The other strand of 128 had a red to greed resistance of 1.7 kOhm.
I was very surprised to see three strand have a resistance so close.
All these strands have been blown around and through lots of weather, so if anything I would have expected something more random.
Makes me wonder, is the insulation in the wire, or elsewhere slowly breaking down?
Meaning in another 3-5 years it gets so low they could be more of a fire risk?
I have had 1 light actually smoke in front of me from the weather, and I have seen pics of others having burned without the fuse blowing.
Anybody have older strands? What resistance do you measure? What about newer strands with only a couple years on them?
Thanks