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Blown Power Supply in HC300


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I am Running an old 1.7.0 system that was installed in 2008.  It controls my hydronic radiant in-floor heating system using 4 Contact Relay extenders, and household lights.  I've been bragging about my system's flawless service for all these years, but after 11 years of faithful service, I had my first failure last night.... the power supply in the HC300 burned out.  

Of Course, it happened in Feburary, in Canada, during the coldest spell of weather so far this winter. It got to -27.2 C at my place last night! (For you americans, that's the temperature of your freezer multiplied by my outrage that you don't use the metric system)  

While I am waiting for a replacement HC300 to arrive ($55 on ebay), I've had to hotwire the controller to an unused 5V supply on my home PC.  Fortunately, it works!  The controller came back to life with all its memory and programming and heat has returned to my home.  

I sure hope I haven't ruined my warranty.

 

HC-300 hotwired.jpg

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Couldn't you just buy a 5V PSU rather than a new (old) HC-300?

If you bought an enclosed one like a laptop PSU ... something like a 20W one would do. I did something similar to an HC-300 years ago and it still plods along quite happily.

The 300s are great for those low speed automation tasks :)

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  • 9 months later...

The Power supply doesnt exist anymore from mouser or allied electronics. I searched and searched and finally came up with a brilliant idea. I didn't want to spend a thousand bucks, so decided to try a 15 bucks solution, and it worked.

I removed the defective power supply and threw it away, then got this part from amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000MGG6SC?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

Connected the MULEs connector( 4 pin on control board), unit powered on. Disconnected the power slot in back and used it to route the brick wire out of HC300, and plugged everything back in. All is working fine as my HC300 is merely being used as an IO extender. Put the cover back on and put all screws back.

Last year when my HC300 power died, I bought one unit from ebay and swapped power, but it lasted only a year. This will hopefully last next several years. Good luck if u do decide to do the same.

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18 hours ago, shoaib.chaudhry said:

The Power supply doesnt exist anymore from mouser or allied electronics. I searched and searched and finally came up with a brilliant idea. I didn't want to spend a thousand bucks, so decided to try a 15 bucks solution, and it worked.

I removed the defective power supply and threw it away, then got this part from amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000MGG6SC?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

Connected the MULEs connector( 4 pin on control board), unit powered on. Disconnected the power slot in back and used it to route the brick wire out of HC300, and plugged everything back in. All is working fine as my HC300 is merely being used as an IO extender. Put the cover back on and put all screws back.

Last year when my HC300 power died, I bought one unit from ebay and swapped power, but it lasted only a year. This will hopefully last next several years. Good luck if u do decide to do the same.

Our CTO has made me throw out all of our old Control4 gear in our office.  Recycled quite a bit of e-waste.  Several HC300s, HC200s, Media Controllers, HTC's, mini touch screens and even the old school sytem remote controls.

The way i look at it if you're invested in the eco-system just upgrade to the latest and greatest (kind of like upgrading cars).

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 years later...

At this point of time, the HC300's are 5 generations behind, 15 years old, and the cost of the power supply costs more than even a HC800 which was released 5 years later and was the high end model at the time (despite their model number, the HC300 is MUCH older than the HC250).

In my opinion, nobody should still be using them. In fact, none of the drivers we write anymore (regardless of how basic)  will support anything less than 2.9.1 (and I recall the last OS for the HC300 was 2.5.3).  And most lighting drivers we write, require OS3.3.0 or later  

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