OurTown
Well-known member
At least that is what it appears to me. It is a D&S combo vac that I bought used, had an IDX Big Time timer, and an 8 position 3 deck rotary switch. The timer had a bunch of bad LED display modules so I converted it over to a Dixmor LED 9 multifunction timer. After wiring it up I noticed that sometimes when I activate the timer and you switch from vac to fragrance the timer goes dormant. It zeros out the time left and shows the version number on the display like when it is first powered on. (that is why I think it is very briefly losing power) After really digging into it I thought that the rotary switch was possibly shorting that position to ground very briefly when turning it but not long enough to blow the transformer fuse. The switch looked like it could have been original so I replaced it with an Electroswitch 31303A. The only difference was that the new one had the "Make Before Break" on the first deck instead of the third deck (or maybe it was the other way around) but I compensated by moving the wiring. BAM! Fixed it! Two months later, the same thing is happening. WTF? I might make a video showing exactly what it does but I'll try to explain in more detail. The 3 left positions when looking at the outside of the vac are for the different fragrances. The 3 right positions are all for the vac motors and are all the same. The straight up top and bottom are dead positions. I'm not sure why D&S wired it like that but I kept it the same and made our new custom decal to fit that. When switching from one of the vac positions to one of the dead positions OR one of the fragrance positions to one of the dead positions is when it seems to kill the power to the timer briefly and reset it. It is intermittent which is what drives me crazy. The "Make Before Break" deck is wired to the vac motors and fragrance air compressor contactors. One of the other decks, "Break Before Make" goes to the three different fragrance solenoid valves. The other "Break Before Make" deck puts 24VAC to the second pricing input on the timer from the 3 fragrance positions. I'm now suspecting that the rotary switch is fine and it is just playing into the issue. One notable difference between the timers is that the Dixmor uses a 24VAC hot input for changing the pricing rate and the IDX needed the wire connected to common. I don't think that plays into the issue directly but was a wiring change I had to make. Thoughts?
