SSR4 Stopping during a show

[MrChristmas2000]

I have been having an interesting problem.

I have two SSR4s mounted in a box together to drive 8 large flakes, all incandesent.

One of the SSR4s will just stop running during ths show. It dosen't loose power, the led I added stays on. But the snowflakes stop turning on.

If I power down the unit for 10seconds or so the SSR4 restarts and will run for a while then shut down again. The ambient temp is under 70deg outside.

Any ideas what may be causing this.

I had one SSR4 that shutdown in that same location and refused to start again, now the replacement is acting just as strange.

Last year the SSR4s were mounted in separate boxes, this year I mounted them on a piece of wood mounted in a larger weatherproof box.

Any thoughts as what to investigate.

[holland lights]

Are you running the ssr4 wireless?

[MrChristmas2000]

No not on that one.

I did run some wireless but have since went back to wired.

[rrowan]

hmm

Remove the LED

The onboard transformer is working its tail off an the led just might be putting it over the edge.

Besides that, does it stop after a certain amount of time or a certain part of the show?

just my 2 cents

Rick R.

[chrisatpsu]

are the boards mounted directly to the wood, or is there standoffs?

does the wood seem wet?

[chrisatpsu]

not wet because of rain, but wet because lumber soaks up moisture from the air.

[jnealand]

You need to look at the total power draw on the SSR4s.  Even the addition of an LED will put it beyond what it can handle.  This is a known problem.  You get far fewer amps per channel on an SSR4 than on an LE.  You may need an LE to drive those elements.

[rm357]

How long is the exteension cord to that locatio, what guage, and how many lights are running off of it?

If there is too much voltage drop in the power to the ssr4, the pic might drop out, but it should reboot on its own.

RM

[MrChristmas2000]

The led may actually be the problem since I added it since last year.

Guess I'll strip them off after the season ends.

The load on each channel is about 100 lights, My inside tree has about 600lights and it hasn't missed a beat and it has an led. Go figure.

Well the SSR4 that was outside seems to be holding in for tonight but I now have 2 inside that are another mystery.

They are on a DMX branch off of a Lynx Express. Both of them have been shutting down and doing a power cycle restarts them working for a varriable period of time. Now the one in the middle of the branch is working but the one that is the termination point will just not restart for more than one song.

An extension to this story is that I had an SSR4 behaving very simillary off a DMX splitter branch but when I connected it in series with other units it hasn't stopped since.

This is driving me crazy!

[wbuehler]

I had some similar issues a few years back when driving SSR4's off of a DMX splitter, I ended up removing the units from the splitter and using the DMX Out 2 on a close by LE and the problem went away.  For the year after that I added wireless Ver 1 to all the units and the problem also remained away.

Bill

[MrChristmas2000]

I didn't have them running off a splitter, I did use a splitter at the head of the network but it feeds a couple of LEs first. That's even changing next year since I now have an extra port to plug it in instead of the splitter.

My experience with wireless have not been that spectacular except for one thing. I have an element out in the yard that I ran this year without a hitch on Ch 2. Ch 1 and Ch 3 for the rest of my DMX would just stop out of the blue and not restart until I powered the transmitter down and back up. Now I may have a couple of bad transmitters which is allways possible. I beieve that one is really sick and the other one may be on the edge of failing. I am going to try to do some testing this summer to see what the potential problem is during my July 4th show.

[Jeffl]

I used a splitter this season to branch off to two sets of LE's and it's the one piece of hardware that worked all season and did not complain at all.  My thought is these should be bullet proof beings there isn't any specialized code running on them that I'm aware of.