REFLECTOR: Dimmer Doubts and the Wiring Saga Continues

[Andrew Ellzey]

MessageTerry,

Your statements for the dimming system are correct. Your enunciators should have power sitting at the bulb waiting for the ground to turn it on. Because you will be varying the voltage from your dimmer to the enunciators, when one of you enunciators is on you will have control of the brightness. Something that you might think about, you said that you were going to dim your warning lights. This is not a common practice. If it is a true warning light it is not typically dimmed. The point is that it is there to tell you to take action and it should be bright enough get your attention. High power circuits like your pitot heat, landing lights or fuel pumps should break the circuit on the positive side.  

Andy 
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Terry Miles 
  To: 'Velocity Aircraft Owners and Builders list' 
  Sent: Friday, August 18, 2006 6:24 AM
  Subject: REFLECTOR: Dimmer Doubts and the Wiring Saga Continues


  Hi All,

  I'm up to the last holes into my panel and could use some collective wisdom.  I have held off on the dimmer controls for last, since every time I looked at the recomended drawing it looked backwards. 

  Up until these dimmers came into my world I had assumed I would put all my switches in the positive side of all the circuits.  You know "power, fuse, switch, user, gound."  In the case of warning light dimmers you can't do that.  The dimmer has to supply the light's plus voltage.  So the warning light always has juice to it, then the trigger condition to turn on the warning light has to be placed into it's path to ground.  So you have this:  Power, dimmer, warning light, trigger condition, ground.  

  Is there any convention to switching the ground side with other devices?  I mean, I could wire the fuel pump or the taxi lights that same way with the control switch acting as the needed continuity to ground instead of being in the plus half of the circuit.

  Thanks for looking at this.

  FYI:  Van's has a nice 4 pot system that is all solid state rated a 1.5 amps each. (read: no heat sinks).  It also has a feature that will tie or untie all the lights to a master dimmer.  

  Regards,
  Terry


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