RailPro > RailPro Specific Help & Discussion
Power supply
G8B4Life:
--- Quote ---Just making the point that for frugal folk such as myself there is a lot of money to be saved when it comes to power supplies. Money I can spend elsewhere on the layout.
--- End quote ---
You don't have to be frugal, just informed. Ring doesn't exactly go around stating that you can use any power supply that outputs ~14volts but quite purposefully goes about promoting their power supply as the only suitable and RE endorsed supply for their system. Nothing wrong with that, that's good business sense to promote your own stuff but it probably does leave most just going with the RE supply than investigating other options. Even I was not 100% sure until I had the thing in my hands.
I also would imagine the number of PWR-56's sold in the starter kits would far outnumber the number of PWR-56's sold separately. This brings us back to the point you made about a complete system, I don't think many, if any modellers would normally have a suitable power supply just laying around so the inclusion of one in a starter kit is a great way of getting going. That's how I did it. Now I have a large 15v 20 something amp SMPS (price was good) which I can break down into separate districts easily enough if needed and the PWR-56 can be used on a test bench.
Another way to look at it (I don't know if RE does or does not look at it this way) is if your trying to lure folk over from DCC you might try to capitalise on the mindset they might have, that being they need an expensive booster for every power district in DCC so if the mindset has set in and they don't think too hard they might just think they need an expensive PWR-56 for each district too.
I think if people needed the repeater functionality but wanted to use their own power supply it would be great if Ring sold the PWR-56 part (the brick is PA-2) separately but I don't see that happening, limitation of liability etc.
- Tim
Alan:
--- Quote ---need an expensive booster for every power district in DCC
--- End quote ---
Is that really true? I thought you only had to add DCC circuit breaker units for each power district.
Dean:
--- Quote from: Alan on September 03, 2016, 11:58:25 AM ---
--- Quote ---need an expensive booster for every power district in DCC
--- End quote ---
Is that really true? I thought you only had to add DCC circuit breaker units for each power district.
--- End quote ---
Yes that's true. If wanted to split my layout into two sections, I would have buy another booster and power supply and run communication cabling back to the main booster. Throw in some circuit breakers and it starts to get expensive.
What I like about the PWR-56 is the fact that you can kill all the power to the track from any place around the layout. I could have used that feature on a couple of occasions. :-[
Alan:
WOW! Ring really needs to advertise that on the web site.
G8B4Life:
--- Quote ---Is that really true? I thought you only had to add DCC circuit breaker units for each power district.
--- End quote ---
Yes and no. Circuit breakers can be used to make power districts, but the typical electronic DCC circuit breakers that are most useful for that purpose I believe are a relatively modern (in the age of DCC itself) development. Before that you used light bulbs (ugh!) or another booster.
The diagram in this article (tonystrains.com/download/MRR-PowerDist.pdf) shows a most likely setup for an informed DCC user today. A user from 10 years ago or an uninformed user of today might have each one of those breakers saying Booster instead. There is a lot of literature around that teaches "except for all but the smallest layouts if you want to run a lot of trains at once, or a number of sound ones break up your layout into districts with smaller capacity boosters rather than using 1 big booster for the whole layout". This is the mindset I talked about.
Going back to the article, our advantage is we can buy a single supply relatively cheap that totals all those boosters and split off from that using breakers (also cheap thanks to it being DC) for our districts. If we need another supply, well that's cheap too. With DCC most small scale boosters are 3 or 5 amp so once your approaching the limit of a single booster (as a heavy yard or engine terminal theoretically could) you need another expensive booster (or more) for other parts of the railroad, or replace with a large really expensive booster - if it's suitable for small scale decoders that is.
- Tim
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