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Jesus Is The Reason For The Season!!
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One of the most important and sometimes difficult thing to do as you expand your display is keep track of your power availability and requirements.
The 2009 display can pull a potential 266 amps of power (I'll explain the potential later). For this display I have installed 11 dedicated 20 amp outlets. These outlets will run my 9 LOR controllers. Each controller can handle 15 amps per side (I haven't upgraded to a 20 amp fuse yet). It actually takes some time to balance the display across the controllers and then balance the controllers across the available outlets. If this is ignored or even rushed it is highly possible you will have blown fuses and tripped breakers all over your display.
I originally used an excel spreadsheet that I had created to track everything, but in 2009 it began to get a little more complicated. A big thanks goes out to Richard Holdman for sharing his spreadsheet. The information on it was very similar to what I had; however, his was formatted much nicer and allowed me to view everything I needed on one page where as my original format took several pages and I found myself jumping back and forth...a lot. I then used his format and tweaked it to suit my display. I added pages for my backyard as well as to track total lights, watts, amps, extension cords, etc. I also created drop down lists to choose items from a main list of controller channels and amps to alleviate possible errors in translating information from section to section. This spreadsheet allows me to track every bulb and amp before my display is even set up. I also added the ability to track amperage across my outlets automatically as well. My spreadsheet is available to download here or using the link above. It may seem complicated at first, but if you know a little about Excel you should be able to figure it out.
One thing you will notice in my spreadsheet and one of the things it helps me with the most is the RG Difference or Red Green Difference. In order to get more out of my display I had to make a change to the 2009 display. I decided to not turn red or green on at the same time. I figured I needed white for impact portions and wanted that to available when the lights were both red or green. It's amazing that when watching the sequences play out, you don't even notice that red and green are never on at the same time for the same object. What this allows me to do is put the red channel for a particular object and the green channel for a particular object on the same side of a controller and basically cancel out the amps for one of the colors. For example: I have a tree that has white, red, and green for a total of 4 amps on each color. If they were dedicated to channel 1, 2 and 3 of controller 1 they would draw 12 amps when all on (almost maxing out that controller). However by never turning red and green on at the same time, the max amps that will ever be drawn from that tree at any given time would be 8 amps when either white and red or white and green are on at the same time. This is a huge amp saver and the spreadsheet does a great job keeping track of this. Good luck and email me with any questions.
---Tony
Fantasy Christmas - Copyright 2008-2010
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