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Your house circuit shoud be fine if you only have the trains on it.
Each ZW is rated at 275w of power they need to operate. Let's say you have (4) ZW's @ 275w to make the math easy. The KW is 190w so it's a bit less.
275w x 4(ZW) = 1100watts. Maximum electrical load to operate if everything is being used to the max.
A typical house circuit is 15amps. A 15a house circuit should handle 1800watts.
[Volts x Amps = Watts] 120volts x 15a =1800watts.
I would worry more about the power strip being able to handle the 1100watts of power.
Kurt
lionel2;
You should wire your tracks to A and D as those are the circuits with whistle and direction control. Use B and C for accessories.
Mel Hazen; Jax, FL Ride Amtrak. It's the only way to fly!!!
lionel2 wrote: So 1800 watts is the max 1 plug outlet can handle.
No. 1800 watts is the capacity for one circuit. You need to find all the things on the circuit you are planning to use for the transformers, and add them into the equasion.
Plug in a radio, for instance, so you can hear it from the fuse box, in various locations, and flip the breaker or unscrew the fuse to see what is connected to that circuit. The radio will go off when it's plugged into that circuit, and breaker is turned off.
Lights, both plug in and/or direct wired, may be connected to the circuit you are planning to use. So look at these too. Lights can be calculated by the wattage of the bulb.
The total for the circuit is 1800 watts max.
The power ratings for the individual transformers are the power that each will draw when fully loaded. It is highly unlikely that the group of 4 will draw anywhere near the sum of their ratings at any time and certainly not continuously. Although your house circuits are protected at 15 or 20 amperes, depending on the wire size used, if the plug you are plugging into the outlet has parallel blades, as it almost certainly does, it is a 15-ampere plug and allowed to draw only 80 percent of that, or 12 amperes. [NEC 2008, Table 210.21(B)(2)] Still, you are unlikely to draw that much.
I would be more concerned about the secondary side. The Zs and ZW have 15-ampere circuit breakers and therefore should be wired to their loads with no smaller than 14 AWG wire. The KW is 10 amperes and can get by with 16 AWG. Depending on the layout size, you might want to use heavier wire to reduce the voltage drop in the wiring; but these sizes are adequate for safety.
If your main lines are completely separate, your idea of running each one from a separate transformer output is okay. However, your mention of turnouts hints to me that you may be expecting to run from main line to main line. In that case, you risk a damaging and dangerous fault current when the train crosses the gap between main lines, particularly if the two main lines are powered from different outputs of the same transformer. The transformers provide no protection against this (as the small print in the KW's service manual admits). For running between transformer outputs, I recommend a block-wiring scheme.
In allocating loads to transformers, you should know that it doesn't make it any easier on the transformer to split up its loads among the outputs available. The multiple outputs are useful for different or differently adjustable voltages for various loads, but won't make a difference if all the loads need the same fixed voltage.
Bob Nelson
How would I overload a transformer? I wouldn't and recommend that you don't.
However, you could connect a 1.6-ohm load between the A and U terminals of a Z transformer and turn it up to 24 volts. The resistor would draw 15 amperes, which is the most that the circuit breaker would allow, and the power out of the transformer would be 360 watts, which would burn up the Z before too long.
You could also connect the A and B terminals together and set the knobs to different voltages. Then you could draw much more than 15 amperes without ever tripping the circuit breaker, and destroy the transformer even faster.
I wonder why you prefer the small knobs for running the trains. I have put big knobs on all the Z controls that I use for that.
Of course, you should use whatever knobs you like for whatever loads; and there certainly is no difference between what's behind the small ones and the large ones. It just surprised me that you would do it that way. I use big knobs for the trains and small for accessories because I'm continually changing the train voltage and hardly ever adjust the accessory voltages. By the way, you can easily move the knobs around to suit yourself. I have three big ones on each of my Zs and one small.
As for blowing up transformers, I really didn't think you wanted to. My advice is still to use heavy-enough wire to be safe. You can get 14, 12, and 10 AWG building wire, solid or stranded, at any "home improvement" store pretty cheaply.
But it is true, as I said, that you can still damage a transformer in several ways, despite its having a functioning circuit breaker. One modification I've made that makes things safer is to put smaller circuit breakers on the individual outputs of large transformers. I use automotive circuit breakers, which are functionally identical to those originally installed in the transformers.
The most important warning though is not to connect the transformer outputs together by running between blocks powered by different transformer outputs. I can't tell whether you were intending to to this; but my advice is not to.
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