System Continuously Powering Down

Hi all,

I've recently moved into a house with C-Bus installed. We have a B&W touchscreen controlling the majority of the outputs in the rear part of the house.

I the last month or so, the touchscreen has started to reset itself more and more often and for varying durations of time.
Diagnostics showed 747->810 power-downs over 6 days. While its off/powered down the controller is non responsive and gang switches don't work and flash on/off.

It has been off for up to 3-4 hours at a time with the only option to manually switch them on from the relays.

side note, when the system resets, it has at times decided to turn on a couple devices (as we woke up to lights and a fan being on after an outage)

I've had a replacement touchscreen B&W put in and its still doing the same thing.
Old touchscreen was 27.6V around 32-34 degs, replacement unit 28.1-28.3V 33-34 degs.

Any assistance would be great.

Cheers

 

By the sounds of that your C-Bus power supply/s are dead/dying. I would look at getting them replaced ASAP. They are possibly installed inside your relay units or dimmers, which if they are you MAY be able to put in a separate supply without having to replace the whole relay or dimmer unit, but depending on the fault this may not fix it.

 

Thanks jboer, I had suspected as much once the second touchscreen was also exhibiting the same behaviour (i.e. powering down constantly).
I recall having 5 relays/dimmers in the house some with and some without Power Supplies.

I'm uncertain on the electrical aspect but I'm assuming if I swap out the powered relays/dimmers, that could be a possibility?

Also a rookie question, why are some units powered and others not?

 

2 Reasons generally - first is cost, if you don't need more capacity you don't need to pay for it. Also you can only have 2000mA of C-Bus power capacity on your network so that if there is a high resistant joint for example, you don't have your cable burning out or ect. Each built in power supply supplies 250mA and each standalone supply gives you 300mA. So if all units did have Bus Power Supplies in them you could only ever have 8 output units on a network.

Without more info, I would say that it would have a very good chance of fixing it.

 

The electrician I've spoken to (who supplied me with the replacement touchscreen) has had prior involvement with C-bus and contacts at Clipsal/Schneider who will try to troubleshoot the touchscreen.

But great to have alternate advise on other potential possibilities to suggest a way forward.

I've been shown the piced and toolkit which looks like a lot of fun, just hoping to have the system stable before trying to set up a custom menu/screen!