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Member's Forum What's inside a 20+ year old dimmer switch?
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What's inside a 20+ year old dimmer switch?

scottiebabe
scottiebabe over 1 year ago

Not much. The dimmer function failed and only the switch function remained functional.

image

image

image

image

The schematic is the same as drawn by this author:

image

The Quadrac (an internally triggered triac, a triac + diac) failed short between all three terminals.

Searching for an X25783 datasheet led me to this,

image

https://images.100y.com.tw/pdf_file/31-Teccor-Quadrac.pdf 

A more common brand that may be similar could be the 

image

https://www.littelfuse.com/media?resourcetype=datasheets&itemid=b4817091-0710-4ac7-a446-a7ffcca0a634&filename=littelfuse_thyristor_q6008lth1led_datasheet.pdf 

The potentiometer used as a rheostat has a switch stacked on top.

Not much inside...

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to dougw +4
    Thankfully its all good news stories. If any fault current went into the earth ground of the mounting box a GFCI breaker would trip. I have never tried or played with Arc Fault breakers (AFCI). I may…
  • robogary
    robogary over 1 year ago +4
    The nice thing is they only stay short briefly if there is a bolted fault :-)
  • dougw
    dougw over 1 year ago in reply to scottiebabe +3
    Amongst the mayhem lies a nice fail-safe design. Nobody got electrocuted and the house didn't burn down.
Parents
  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago

    Update! There was a party inside.

    The pot terminals flashed over to the case at some point...

    image

    image

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  • phoenixcomm
    phoenixcomm over 1 year ago in reply to scottiebabe

     scottiebabe hey, now I can say "Cool pictures!" ~~Cris PS just fix the stupid thing.  

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to phoenixcomm

    Thank you for the find words. I will add a quadrac to my next order and post a scope-shot with my scopemeter. 

    image

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  • electronicbiker
    electronicbiker over 1 year ago in reply to scottiebabe

    I do like that oscilloscope! Might even get one myself to replace the ages-old Tektronix battery portable. Does it have BNC sockets for X, Y, and external timebase inputs?

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  • Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps over 1 year ago in reply to electronicbiker

    It has BNC inputs for channel 1 and 2. Not for external timebase.

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  • Jan Cumps
    Jan Cumps over 1 year ago in reply to electronicbiker

    It has BNC inputs for channel 1 and 2. Not for external timebase.

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