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

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.
  • 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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  • phoenixcomm
    phoenixcomm over 1 year ago in reply to scottiebabe

    yup, they wanted to see where the Zero crossing point was.  ~~ Cris

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to electronicbiker

    The air gap between the leads of a TO-220 devices is approximately 1.5 mm. So while not ideal, its no worse than the triac. Maybe the new ones have conformal coating, not sure...

    But, yes all plausible failure modes. Mains is 120 Vrms on this side of the pond.

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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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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to phoenixcomm

    The old CFL bulbs would throw a fit being run off a dimmer 

    image

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  • bradfordmiller
    bradfordmiller over 1 year ago in reply to scottiebabe

    Thanks to those damn things I had to buy a cordless vacuum. The regular one always tripped the arc fault and I've only got so many bathrooms to stretch the cord to.

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to bradfordmiller

    I have only heard stories about them nuisance tripping...

    I wonder what an AFCI testers is? maybe a shortwave rf transmitter...

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to scottiebabe

    Not sure looked a few patents for generating an AFCI test current

    image image

    https://patents.google.com/patent/US8179145 

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to $parentForumReply.Author.DisplayName

    image

    I wonder what the AFCI button does...

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  • scottiebabe
    scottiebabe over 1 year ago in reply to $parentForumReply.Author.DisplayName

    image

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