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ADS8 - Sparks flying


dale_andrew

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I recently bought the DCC Concepts ADS8 and it works really well with Railmaster. I'm using 4 of the 8 ports to power my points. However, whilst the track power was off, i moved it a little and a spark came from near the first port. This has happened a couple of times - again whilst it wasn't powered. I'm guessing this isnt normal behaviour? It still works BTW.

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Hi Dale, I'm not familiar with this particular decoder but I'm guessing it has Capacitor Discharge  Unit(s) (CDU) on board to power the point motors. It is quite normal for these to hold a charge after power is removed. If possible you might want to discharge them through one of the point motors before working around it.

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After the track power is switched off, it is likely the capacitors (the big black components of which there is one near each port output) will stay charged for some time and these will be the source of your sparks. But it can only happen if something is shorting out across their outputs, and that certainly isn't normal.

 Look for anything that can be causing this. Start from the point motor, it's wiring and then on the connections to the ADS8. Look for stray wire etc. 

also best in future to post such topics in the DCC forum rather than General as you will reach more DCC/ADS8 users that way. 

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