How to Control Christmas Lights - How to do almost anything with Christmas Displays.
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HowTo: Heavy Duty 8 Relay Parallel Controller  (Michael Ball)


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Step 4 : Wiring the outlets to eachother.

I wired all the grounds and nuetrals of the outlets in series with a ring connecter and 10 gauge wire. I then took a 16 5 inch sections of the same wire an attatched to each hot pole on the 8 switched outlets. The commons all meet up at a barrier strip. The hot lines all attatch to the the relat terminals. The relay common hot then each seperatly(though series would have worked) go to the hot on that barrier strip. This is where it gets confusing. I ran the power directly in from the box to the barrier strip on the door. I then attatched it to a switch and fed it back into the box and to another portion of the strip.
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Step 5 : The addition of I/O exterior barrier strips, Status and Power indicators, and a Switch

I decided to use the extra half of the relay for I/O circuits on barrier strips, for in this particular case, the control of fog machines, or for those of you with those christmas lights with a button to change power, there you go. These strips do open and close with the corresponding outlet.
Here it is midway though the barrier strip and indicator insertion:
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And here is something to bleed out of your ears if trying to imitate(much easier if you are to take it step by step).
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Step 6 : Mounting the Kit 74

Not very exciting, just ran the wires of the binding posts from the relays and attatched it to a "wall-wart(not seen in thgat picture, but the wall transformers, I opened it up and used the transformer)"
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Step 7 : The most complicated hinge in the world

Now at this point I could have easily just attatched the relays to the kit 74, but OCD made me decide to put a 25 pole relay at the edge of the box and the door. I attatched the 16 leads from the seperate LEDs on the door to this strip. I then ran a hot from each relay to the strip, and joined all the nuetrals together for each relay and ran it through one common. I set up a corresponding strip on the bottom which attatched to the kit 74.
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I then joined the two
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Step 8 : Explanation of the kit 74 connections

The kit 74 already has 8 5 amp 3 pole relays on it. But I figured I'd get some heavy duty ones, with 6 poles, which would both allow for more current to be drawn(well, not really, i dont have any 40 amp plugs in my house I am aware of, besides the dryer maybe, but thats 220volts, and thats a whole other thing)
Anyway, I used the kit 74 relays to switch on and off 120 volts to control the other bigger relays.



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