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Re: Circuit Breakers

Alexander Wood All Messages By This Member #45 Andris, I don't think that DCC should be done entirely as a low-bid contract, but if that's the only metric you're looking at Digitrax just dominates almost everything else. If anything, the smaller the boosters, the more total amps you'll need, and the higher the cost will be for the smaller boosters. I don't think spare boosters are really necessary, and I don't think it's fair to include them in a cost comparison. A spare command station makes more sense, in the Digitrax world this could serve as a booster during normal operations. The command station could also normally run with no load, or a lightly loaded accessory bus, and also be the backup booster. Or a lightly loaded district could be identified to cross-tie if a booster does go out, which AFAIK, is a very rare occurrence. The Digitrax power supplies are ridiculously overpriced, it's one of the few things that they do poorly on cost wise, most of the rest of their stuff is quite cost effective. There are a lot of alternative power supplies available, and they are often MUCH cheaper, especially for the DB220s. I have a ~$25 power supply running my DCS240 that's specifically advertised on eBay for the purpose. The cost of bus wiring is an interesting and salient point. The whole "DCC goes 30 feet" thing is a BS myth, there are many layouts pushing DCC power well over 100', and it works fine given the proper wire gauge. You are correct, however, to point out that copper is not cheap, and nor is the wire. It gets really squirrely really quickly, but when you get into things like accessory buses, it is often cheaper to "waste" the "precious" DCC power on accessories that don't need DCC, or can be powered separately via DC than to run yet another bus that uses more expensive copper wire. So running 14 gauge buses from the YaMoRC boosters may well save a significant amount of wiring cost versus running larger, longer main 12 gauge buses to circuit breakers that feed 14 gauge track buses. There are probably also some technical advantages to having the boosters closer to the districts in terms of electrical noise and signal quality. Overall, from what I've seen of the initial pricing, YaMoRC appears to be quite competitive price wise, in keeping with what Digikeijs has done, and arguably shouldn't really be compared to a legacy system like Digitrax, and only to its modern system peers in Digikeijs, ESU, Roco, and TCS. Alex toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 11:11?PM Andris Cuksts <andriscuksts@...> wrote: Alex, ?? cost per amp for a system's booster is an interesting metric but when I did my cost comparison for the club my goal was a low total cost of the "whole" package at the time.? In our case the requirement to have spare parts as backups make Digikeijs, and if bought today, YaMoRC to be a better deal, because theses systems have a cheaper single unit command station and booster vs the Digitrax and NCE plus the extra cost of a circuit breaker.?? Also, I did not hunt around for suitable and cheaper power supplies for Digitrax/NCE/ESU gear.?? We only priced their off the shelf power supplies for their systems since we were new to DCC with no electrical engineers in our club to make the safe workable alternative choices. ? ? ?? The other reason we were drawn to Digikeijs and it applies to YaMoRC too is that we could spread the 3 amp boosters around the layout and have the power near where we needed it.? In our particular case because of the design of our layout, if we bought? big 16 amp or 8 amp booster to get low $/amp it is then offset by the extra cost of the power bus that has to be run to the far reaches of the layout from 7 circuit breakers.?? We would have at minimum 30 ft runs from each circuit breaker, not good to ensure no loss of signal or voltage drop.??? It was cheaper to run the flat 6 wire telephone cable for the loconet between 7 boosters then spend extra cash on 12 gauge power bus wire from 2 or 3 big booster....and you well know copper these days is not cheap. ? So there are plenty of other considerations when buying a system, but every customer has different requirements and a different layout and in our case I was just pointing out that in general a YaMoRC system is cost competitive for our specific requirements and circumstances. Andris -- 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

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#45

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