lbuilding lighting "Tip of the day"


lmackattack

lmackattack

old school
I was adding interior/exterior lights to a section of my layout that has an
3'x3' access hatch for maintence. Any of these lights that were on or in a building placed on the hatch had to be some how wired so that I could use the hatch without keeping the buildings in place. So what I did was wire up the building as I wanted it to be and then put a male plug lead on it. I wired the female plug to a nearby track. I can now have a building with multible lights and simply unplug the building from the power source with ease. I wired up 3 buildings tonight and it works great. The plugs were from my stash of old RC car and airplane reciver battery packs, switches,servos etc... they are dirt cheep new and you can get from any LHS that has RC radio.

just a helpfull tip incase you needed an idea for this.

Trent
 
Trent, the plug thing is a good idea for making it easy to remove lighted buildings from a layout in general. However, I'm confused by your statement that you wired the female lead to a nearby track. Are you using track power to light buildings? If so, that's really not a good idea. You put too big a load on the DCC controller and you're feeding 16 volts AC to the lights, which means they will be too bright and burn out way too fast. If you're really doing it this way, let me know and I'll give you a cheap and easy way to light your layout without blowing up your DCC controller or your bulbs. :)
 
Hi Jim
yes the power is fed from the track feed. I was told thats what was nice about DCC is you can use track feed for power?
 
No, who ever gave you that advice is a little confused. First, every light uses amperage you need to run trains. Second, theres no way to control the brightness of the layout lighting without out a lot of series wiring, which is a real pain.

The easy way to do this is pick up a big, cheap MRC DC powerpack. You can get them for practically nothing from e-bay now that people are switching to DCC. You then run a bus around under the layout with the bus connected to the 12 volt variable (throttle) output of the power pack. For every light, just drill a hole in the table top, run down the two wires from the light, and connect them to the two bus wires. You can solder the wires, use 3M suitcase type connectors or, my favorite, Posi-Tap's. No wire stripping, you can make a connection in less than a minute, 100% reliability, and completely reusable. Repeat until you've got all your lights hooked up. The nice thing is you have an independent power supply, so a short in a light doesn't smoke your DCC controller, and you can easily vary the brightness using the power pack throttle. Most lights are way too bright at 12 volts, let alone 16 volts, and running them at about 8 volts not only makes the lighting look more realistic but the bulbs give off less heat and they'll last almost forever. I've got one of the older copper color MRC power packs running about 65 bulbs on my layout and it works great.
 
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Ok thanks for the heads up. I had herd on small layouts with minimal lightig that it would be Ok do use track feed power. I will be disconnecting it from the track tomorrow. I already have a Bus line from an old MRC controler. I use it to maintain the RPM of 2 oil pumps. I will tap into that source tomorrow.
thanks for the heads up.

Trent
 
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