Ok, Not very active I know, but I cleaned up a few loose ends, managed to light another couple of rooms and my front door.
The first thing I did was tidy up my board where all the power goes in and out.
It doesn't look very tidy now but there were even more cables around than this before I started. The additions to the board are the fuse box that you can see at around 7 o'clock and the regulator that sits next to it on the bit of light pine.
I belated realsed that a fuse box was a must, and built one that can hold upto 5 fuses. Each fuse is connected to the 4mm sockets top and bottom of the box. I've used 4mm plugs to take the power around and off the board. I've just begun to wonder if that might not be the safest idea as it's easy to make a wrong conection. However, it is easy to disconnect anything really quickly, and to put meters in almost anywhere. At the moment, there are two fuses being used and these are both 1A.
The regulator puts out 12v via a 2940 chip, and I'm running this into the house using the third (usually earth) lead of my three core flex. This means that I can put in individual lights to this regulated line, but if there are a lot of lights in one locale, they have their own reg and this comes off the other line. (They share the negative).
I can hear the alarm bells ringing now. Yes, I do realise that the negative is taking both loads, but the total current is very low, it's all less than 1 amp so far and very unlikely to go above 3.
The reason I'm doing it like this is that I have a few lights that are always on/active. One of them being above my front door......
This is a standard downlighter fitted with a MR16 LED, and runs through a little light detecting circuit so that it only comes on at dusk. It gives a lot of light and is very effective.
Cheers.
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