I am thinking about hooking a Lionel 180 Watt Power House to my TIU. Three questions:
1) Would I need an inline circuit breaker? Or is the built in one in the PH180 and the TIU enough to handle it?
2) Is there a PH180 to TIU adapter cable, I really do not want to cut the end plug off my Power House cord
3) How do you determine which wire is hot and which is common on the PH180
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I am thinking about hooking a Lionel 180 Watt Power House to my TIU. Three questions:
1) Would I need an inline circuit breaker? Or is the built in one in the PH180 and the TIU enough to handle it?
2) Is there a PH180 to TIU adapter cable, I really do not want to cut the end plug off my Power House cord
3) How do you determine which wire is hot and which is common on the PH180
1.) PH-180s have excellent breakers, I think you will be just fine with that. The only other thing that might be slightly faster than the PH-180 is a PSX-AC.
2.) Yes, CT McCormick hardware has them and Lionel sells a wiring kit for their TPC's or something that will work. It's called TMCC wire adapters or something like that? Some have suggested cutting off the connector and using spade connectors, I chose the adaptor cables as I didn't want to cut off the connectors.
3.) If you get the adapter from McCormick, it will be marked with red and black wires. Not sure about Lionel's. I'll see if I can dig out more info.
Here's a thread on the hot and common wires.
Lionel 180w Powerhouse transformer Hot/Neutral
gunrunnerjohn and maybe others have posted part numbers to make your own connectors, if you want those I will look around some more, I have them around here somewhere.
An in-line circuit breaker can't hgurt. It would add a level of redundancy, and you could use a lower capapcity breaker, depending on your normal usage, to have quicker circuit opening on derailments.
In my 'purely fiddling around and unscientific' tests here, the PSX-AC is the only thing that is faster than the PH-180's. And to be fair the PSX-AC was set to 8 amps and the PH-180 is 10 amps. The PH-180's have excellent breakers and they are VERY fast. I have not found another breaker that is faster, except the PSX-AC. And now that I have my layout all hooked up the way things are supposed to be, I have actually had the PH-180's trip faster than the PSX-AC's a couple of times.
I think gunrunnerjohn has possibly tested the PH-180's (as you know, he knows what he is doing, unlike me). I know he knows a lot more about the PH-180 breakers as well.
I use PH180 bricks with my TIU, no problems. Lionel uses AC color coding, white and black. MTH uses DC color coding, red and black. This is AC. I wire Lionel's black to MTH's red and Lionel's white to MTH's black. What every you do be consistent. MTH's black goes to the outside rail. Connect all TIU black terminals together and add the Legacy connection.
Lionel did not run the neutral the whole way thru the PH180 so there really is no polarity. There were some old 135 bricks wired backwards so you need to be careful of phasing if using multiple bricks/TIU channels on one loop as clem does, or cross over from one loop to another where each loop has its own brick/TIU channel, my layout.
Search the forum for clem's thread from this fall. Gunrunner also listed the part #s to build your own adapter cables.
Dan
Those connectors look like just what I want, thanks
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