Can an electroics guru give me an opinion on this unit?


DCC, with an NCE Power Cab. The accessories that I would want to power separately are 6 turnout switch motors, some building/street lighting and maybe a couple of crossing signals or something similar.

Jeff
 
Unless you plan to do some welding with it, that's probably a lot more amps than you need. Tortoise switch motors require about 16 milliamps when stalled (less when moving). So all 6 only add up to about .1 Amp. (1000 milliamps per Amp)

Typical incandescent "grain of wheat" bulbs are maybe 30 milliamps to 80 milliamps each, LEDs less. So it would take a huge number to justify an 8 Amp supply.

A cheap dead simple DC wall wart would probably provide plenty of power unless you are planning a Times Square display.

Personally, I wouldn't want 8 amps on a circuit that needs a lot less, but I've been shocked by 8 Amps and it was not pleasant.
 
For just the accessories, i.e. building lights, that will suffice quite well. For the turnout motors, that depends on the motor. If they are snap switches, they should work well, one at a time with the power supply. If they are Tortoise stall motor type machines, you can probably run all of them at the same time with that supply.
I wouldn't rely on that power supply to run the NCE system. You would want a little more DC voltage or else your trains would be running pretty slow.
 
Wow, I knew these things didn't draw a lot of amperage, but didn't realize it was that small. I do have a 12 volt DC wall wart that is rated at 1 amp. Maybe I should just cut the plug off the end of it and wire it into a terminal strip and then run the bus from there and be done with it.

Jeff
 
The NCE system has its own power and I want to keep it separate from the accessories so it has all the power it needs. The switch motors are the Tortoise type motors. Sounds like I have been over engineering this. See previous post on just using the 1 amp 12 volt wall wart.

Jeff
 
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