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Power Outage and Lighting


nevets23

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All,

I'm not sure if I'm just missing something, or if this is a little more complicated than one would think. I had a power outage at our house last night due to some bad storms. I have a generac generator with automatic transfer switch. Most of the house is on the generator (including my director/primary controller), but not everything. One of the items not on the generator is the landscape lighting.

The landscape lighting is on a c4 adaptive phase dimmer that is on a schedule to come on at sunset and turn off at 3am. Since the power was still out at sunset last night, when the scheduler executed the action to turn on the landscape lighting, nothing happened since the adaptive phase dimmer didn't have power.....makes sense.

The issue is this.....the power was restored at around 9pm last night, but the landscape lighting didn't turn on as I would have expected....I guess it makes sense since the action to turn on the lights already executed and it's an action not a time, or defined time span.

Is there a way to ensure the landscaping lights come back on when the power comes back on from a power outage? I don't think "when the project loads" is an option, because the controller itself is on the generator, so the project won't load/reload when the power comes back on.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. It seems like there should be an easy way to handle this situation.

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1 hour ago, nevets23 said:

All,

I'm not sure if I'm just missing something, or if this is a little more complicated than one would think. I had a power outage at our house last night due to some bad storms. I have a generac generator with automatic transfer switch. Most of the house is on the generator (including my director/primary controller), but not everything. One of the items not on the generator is the landscape lighting.

The landscape lighting is on a c4 adaptive phase dimmer that is on a schedule to come on at sunset and turn off at 3am. Since the power was still out at sunset last night, when the scheduler executed the action to turn on the landscape lighting, nothing happened since the adaptive phase dimmer didn't have power.....makes sense.

The issue is this.....the power was restored at around 9pm last night, but the landscape lighting didn't turn on as I would have expected....I guess it makes sense since the action to turn on the lights already executed and it's an action not a time, or defined time span.

Is there a way to ensure the landscaping lights come back on when the power comes back on from a power outage? I don't think "when the project loads" is an option, because the controller itself is on the generator, so the project won't load/reload when the power comes back on.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. It seems like there should be an easy way to handle this situation.

no, you have a schedule, it ran, nothing was there.  The only thing you can do in this instance is turn it on manually and the schedule will turn it off

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Does this happen frequently enough to worry about it?  If you care enough you could run a task every hour or so to turn on the lights if it is after sunset.  You could also set up some sort of a sensor that takes action when the power goes off and build some programming around that.  Perhaps there are UPS drivers for C4 that you could use without having to hack things together.

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1 hour ago, msgreenf said:

no, you have a schedule, it ran, nothing was there.  The only thing you can do in this instance is turn it on manually and the schedule will turn it off

I figured that was the case. Obviously not the end of the world, however it would seem like there would be an option in composer like "when landscaping dimmer is offline, and it comes back online, if it is night and the landscaping lights are not on, turn them on"

The issue is there isn't a programming variable for "when 'X' device is offline and then comes online"

 

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Do you have the processor on battery backup?

If not,

You could turn landscape light on---- with programming in the "When the project "Project name here" loads"

Also put a conditional on the time of day in this

This essentially would after a power outage or reboot, trigger the lights to on if the condition meets that time of day.

 

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5 minutes ago, nawty said:

Do you have the processor on battery backup?

If not,

You could turn landscape light on---- with programming in the "When the project "Project name here" loads"

Also put a conditional on the time of day in this

This essentially would after a power outage or reboot, trigger the lights to on if the condition meets that time of day.

 

It is on a battery backup, in addition to the generator, which means the controller never looses power, so that wouldn't work. 

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11 minutes ago, Home Theater Advisors said:

How often do you lose power that this is an issue? Seems like your looking for a solution to a very rare problem (and if you’re losing power that often, I’d say you have bigger problems to solve for!!)

Don't loose power that often, however, it would still be nice to implement a remedy!

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2 minutes ago, nevets23 said:

Don't loose power that often, however, it would still be nice to implement a remedy!

the only remedy I would recommend is to put a schedule in hourly to turn on the schedule.  At worst you have a 59  min outage.

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You could always put a UPS on one of the outlets not on the generator.  When the power goes out have it send a power out command to your sage server - you could use something like the WebEvents drivers.  Then when the power comes back send a new event - power on.  This likely has to be connected to a PC and using software like APC's PowerChute.  Or as I said earlier use a sensor of some that does something when the power goes off - like a sensor connected to the outputs of a relay that opens when power goes off.

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12volt power supply hooked through the contact closure plugged into a non battery backup outlet...

Power out,  contact closure shows open,     check if time of day is between 7pm and 3 am  if so then turn landscape lights on

 

Seems like a lot of tinkering to have lights out for 1 night, but thats only my 2 cents.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, nawty said:

12volt power supply hooked through the contact closure plugged into a non battery backup outlet...

Power out,  contact closure shows open,     check if time of day is between 7pm and 3 am  if so then turn landscape lights on

 

Seems like a lot of tinkering to have lights out for 1 night, but thats only my 2 cents.

 

 

Agreed, I think I'm just going to let it go!

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We have fairly regular power outages in South Africa, so I have sensors that tell me when power drops, when the generator comes on etc.

I have a macro that I run whenever power returns or the generator goes on and this sorts out all sorts of little things (like garden lights) that go out of sync after a power cut.  I run the same macro after a controller reboot but that is far less frequent.  Once you have the sensors, you find all sorts of things (LED states, relay settings etc.) that benefit from such a macro.

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  • 7 months later...
On 10/17/2017 at 12:40 AM, South Africa C4 user said:

We have fairly regular power outages in South Africa, so I have sensors that tell me when power drops, when the generator comes on etc.

I have a macro that I run whenever power returns or the generator goes on and this sorts out all sorts of little things (like garden lights) that go out of sync after a power cut.  I run the same macro after a controller reboot but that is far less frequent.  Once you have the sensors, you find all sorts of things (LED states, relay settings etc.) that benefit from such a macro.

@South Africa C4 user what kind of sensors are you using for this? We have the same power outage where I'm based. 

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11 hours ago, maskas said:

@South Africa C4 user what kind of sensors are you using for this? We have the same power outage where I'm based. 

We are using card access sensors (as far as I know) installed by my dealer. One for each of the 3 electrical phases and one for the generator.  All plugged into controllers / IO extenders which are on UPS. Without the UPS, this would not work!

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