ELV Garden Fire Warning

!: ELV Garden Fire Warning

A Video I decided to make demonstrating that a possible fire hazard exists when using high power or high VA rated 12V garden light transformers to power your garden lights. The hazard exists as the fuse in the transformer is typically too big, and the cable runs out to the lights can be over 10 Meters long, and often you will find the cable resistance is so high, that if an overload or short circuit appears towards the end of the cable, the cable could burn and catch fire, where there is not enough fault current to trip the transformers protection. In fact the short may be just seen as a heavy load and perfectly within the maximum transformers rating. Note: 12V at 400VA is 33A however for the transformer fuse to blow or thermal overload in the transformer to trip the load needs to be considerably more. There are a number of solutions to this problem, other than the ones I have given. Also note that the hazard really only exists with high VA rated transformers, as the smaller units typically do not have enough short circuit fault current capacity to burn the cables, but rather the transformer fails first, tripping the internal thermal fuse.

ELV Garden Fire Warning

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