开云体育

Re: Circuit Breakers

Alexander Wood All Messages By This Member #27 Oldngrey, It's true that 3A boosters require significantly more booster than 5A or 8A boosters in order to ensure that enough power is available to any given power district. At least if you're using the boosters as your power districts, then you're getting something out of the additional cost of excess boosters, whereas a layout that is using PSX/PSXX breakers off of 5-8A boosters gets nothing out of excess boosters. More smaller boosters may have some technical advantages, and it does simplify wiring, but they are going to cost significantly more than fewer larger boosters with circuit breakers on an amp for amp basis. The cost is NOT comparable. A YaMoRC YD7403 is US$127.50, whereas a PSXX-1 is US $50. Meanwhile, in the US you can get an 8A Digitrax booster for about the same as the YaMoRC YD7403, you do need to add a power supply, but you can get a $20 laptop brick off of eBay. Digitrax also has the DB220 dual 8A booster, which is significantly cheaper on a per-amp basis than just about anything else on the market. There are certainly advantages to more smaller boosters managing their own power districts, but cost is not one of them. The only thing that comes close cost wise is the Tam Valley booster at $60. There used to be a lot of really cheap used Digitrax boosters, but post-COVID the prices of everything train related on eBay seems to have gone way up. There are also some key differences between European and American boosters. A lot of European boosters don't use a booster common, almost all American boosters do. Most European boosters are opto-isolated, some American boosters are, and some aren't. A booster common is required for proper operation if a booster common isn't present, although there has been discussion about the DR5033, as it doesn't use a booster common, and appears not to be opto-isolated, which makes the LocoNet the return current path. Another issue that comes into play is that most American boosters do not support the RailCom cutout, whereas many European boosters do. If RailCom is something that you want, then at least for now, you're better off with more smaller European boosters. The reality is that the vast majority of home layouts would be fine with a single 5-8A system feeding the entire layout. Even layouts with a dozen operators usually aren't drawing more than a couple of amps at most in HO scale. And a lot of home layouts that only have a couple of operators would be fine with a single 3A system feeding the entire layout. Alex toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 12:03?AM Oldngrey <steve_donald_@...> wrote: Alex and karst, A few comments to add to the mix... 1. Yes my layout design uses 8 unit trains each double heading ie 2 locos per train. They spend most of their time sitting in Layover Tracks (aka Shadow Stations, Fiddle Yards, or hidden sidings). When I did euro modelling the DB locos were individually more powerful than the US locos so maybe that's why that is less 'European' in flavour. 2, With YaMoRC boosters being rated at 3 Amps, it's a different design for power distribution than American systems. Since it's viable to put in a booster wherever I would have considered using a circuit breaker (cost is comparable), I am contemplating a design where each Feedback module is directly linked to its own booster ('comically' or not:). I could only have about 3 trains per booster anyway. iTrains makes it worse since many more trains can be on the move at one time. 3. A design inefficiency would lie in the fact that not all 16 feedback inputs would be used pairing one feedback module with each booster. In fact for a reversing loop only 1 input would be used. Your feedback modules only connect to one power/booster district. Anyway, I hope there is enough information to make a recommendation - do I bother with circuit breakers when I would "comically" over supply my layout with boosters? Thanks Alex for making it obvious to me that my design is comically overboosted..... -- Alexander Wood Hartford-New Haven, CT Modeling the modern era freelanced G&W Connecticut Northern in HO Digikeijs DR5000 - JMRI - ProtoThrottle - TCS UWT-100 - TCS UWT-50p - Digitrax Simplex

View All 16 Messages

#27

Join [email protected] to automatically receive all group messages.