good afternoon youtube so this is a project i built about six years ago
i guess i called it a light bar the idea with this is i have a ac power cord coming in here
and then i've got four ceramic light bulb sockets and each one here has a switch that i can turn
a particular socket on or off i use this for a couple of projects one is i used it as a
dummy load for testing my ac power inverter testing efficiencies at various
loads so the idea is i could put in maybe a 150 watt bulb and 100 watt bulb and a
couple other light bulbs and i could turn on 150 watt load i could turn on another 100 watts so
then with that i could vary the power that this dummy load dissipates that worked pretty well and
then i also used this for testing various light bulbs like led light bulbs side by side and i
could change this out right now i have a z-wave smart plug in here that this plug i can turn
on and off remotely and when it's powering this light bar it also monitors the power consumption
earlier i had a light dimmer in here and i use that to test various led light bulbs so i could
set say 10 percent dimmer turn on this bulb see what it does and i could turn on this other bulb
see what it does at that same level turn them both on have three or four bulbs in a circuit
just testing out how the dimmer works i haven't used this too much recently i think the last time
i used it was a couple years ago you can see it's a little bit dirty so i had an idea to change this
slightly go back to like when i had a light dimmer in here so i picked up a new light
dimmer this is an in-wall version but instead of having actual light bulbs what i'm using instead
is one of these ceramic heat lamps so i picked up like four of these ceramic heat lamps they have a
heat element in here that gets hot they're 150 watts and you have to use these with
ceramic sockets they they warn not to use them with the plastic ones so i can just swap these out
like i said the original design was set up so i could change load by switching lamps on and off
then i had the z-wave receptacle which i could turn the whole thing on and off but what i want
to do is replace that with this light dimmer have that z-wave controlled and then be able to
run all 600 watts of these lamps through the dimmer and be able to control it from one
percent up to a hundred percent or roughly from six watts up to 600 watts and have that
computer controlled so i'm going to remove this smart plug and replace it with this dimmer here
line and load neutral and oh a traveler i don't need the traveler there's your
round screw so i just have to hook up the line the load and the neutral and we should be good to go
okay i think i got this figured out had to look in the wiring diagram in the instructions
because both the input or line terminals just say line they don't say which one is the load
but if you look here here's the switch this is the end with the ground screw and this is the end
that goes to the load and then the incoming power goes to the screw that's opposite the ground so i
think that'll go i just have to shove everything back in there i've been following the electrodacus
group on google groups page and there's a lot of the people using the sbms solar bms system
and a lot of them are doing what they call diversion loads while back dacian had come up
with a digital d mppt setup it was basically some solid state relays that could switch solar panels
from charging the battery to running a diversion load like a a water heater is pretty common
so you'd put maybe some 24 volt water heater elements in a hot water tank
and then you would dump the excess power into those heat elements and heat your water well i
have a gas water heater that uses about a dollar of gas a month so i don't have any real need or
ability to actually use anything for water heat but i was thinking this could be a diversion load
for my solar power system in the winter when i have excess power i could just dump it into these
heat lamps and radiate the heat inside the house and get some additional heat out of it
so my sbms 120 isn't necessarily set up to do that my thinking is i've got the ac
power inverter it's a hybrid inverter and i have it set up so that there's the load
there's the battery and then there's the grid so i want to be able to send charging power to the
battery and the load first and anything extra will get used up by this device in the winter
figure i would repurpose this thing here and basically the same thing i was using before
except now it's going to all be automatic and be controllable like down to six watt increments
roughly but yeah we'll see how this thing works i got to get these wires stuffed in get everything
packed in there and then we'll see about hooking this up to my z-wave system and then see if we can
get this thing working as sort of a diversion load to use up excess power on my solar power system
so stay tuned for that follow-up video and as always thanks for watching