Lights No Longer Working

[Richard Boddington]

Ok here's my situation, I have a number of lighted buildings running off the AC of a standard train controller. They are all wired in parallel. At least I think so anyway? I have two wires that come off the AC terminals and go into the the two leads of the light, two wires come off the join and continue onto the next light, and so on.

It was all working perfectly for a very long time. I plug in the power to the controller and all of my lights would come on nice and bright.

Then all of a sudden, problem, I turn on the power and half the lights come on only very dim (as if they where in series) and the other half stay off. The power unit makes a clicking noise, then all the lights go out.

If I wait a minute I can plug the power unit back in and get same result, half the lights dim for a minute, clicking noise, and they all go out.

I ran the main leads to a different power supply to see if the power unit was the issue but I got the same results.

So I'm really stumped here, if a light bulb has died in my circuit would it produce this result?

Any other ideas?

Thanks
R,

 

[Cjcrescent]

What you have is a short. The wires are touching either somewhere or touching something causing the power unit to overload and the circuit breaker to trip. Thats the clicking noise you hear.

You need to trace all of the wiring circuit and find this, or it will continue. You also need to insulate the joints in the wires with either shrink tubing or electrical tape.

 

[Richard Boddington]

Partial Fix

Ok I have it partly fixed, the last lighted unit in my circuit is not working. When I cut it out of the circuit all of the rest of the lights came back on nice and bright.

Not sure if the bulbs are gone in that unit or if the wiring has failed?

Of course this does not bode well for the rest of my circuit, it's only a matter of time before another bulb(s) goes and then what? Changing the bulbs on these model railroad houses is a total nightmare!

Thank-you, Cjcrescent, I just saw your post. I'll have to take that last lighted unit off the set up and see if there is a short in there. All of the connections are wrapped in electrical tape, yes.

R,

 

[fast_ian]

Not sure if the bulbs are gone in that unit or if the wiring has failed?

Bulbs generally fail to "open", so I'd agree with CJ - There's a short in there somewhere. (Critters?)

Why did you decide to cut out the last unit? [I'm not arguing, just wondering why you went there btw]

Cheers,
Ian

 

[Richard Boddington]

Well by cutting out the last lighted warehouse the rest of the lights have come on at full brightness and the transformer no longer cuts out. The warehouse is made up of two street lights that I installed under the canopy and ran the wires out via holes I drilled on the bottom. So it's a "custom" job. I wired the two street lights in series and ran the leads into the rest of wiring. It worked fine for months, then it stopped working properly.

So I will have to take that warehouse off and pull the wiring apart to see if I can find the issue with it.

R,