I’ve seen this topic pop up a lot lately. How are you you wiring 2 bag motors off a single controller? Are you just splitting the power leads off the controller to dual motors? If so are you upping the circuit breaker to a 30 amp. We’ve switched to swerve and would like to free up some spots in the PDP. We’re using 2 bag motors to run our hopper.
Yes. The 3-conductor version of the wago 221 connector is a nice way to do this kind of splice.
https://www.wago.com/global/installation-terminal-blocks-and-connectors/compact-splicing-connector/p/221-613
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Do you use ferrules with those or not? We have many of those connectors, but just began using them.
We use bare wire and hey work great. Never had a problem. The work with solid wiring so I imagine a ferrule would be fine, but also adds a potential failure point that is unnecessary.
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I’ve used 'em both ways. I prefer ferrule to keep the strands together but it’ll work fine with or without.
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They are using the wago cage-clamp internally (same family as the pdb uses, just a different housing) which is designed to be used primarily with loose wire, and should be derated for solid or round ferrules due to the smaller contact area. see e.g. this or this
So I would be cautious using ferrules with wago lever-nuts/221s, even if the 221 specs do list solid core as acceptable.
Guys,
Using the Wago ferrules with the Wago crimper produces a square cross section to maximize contact area with the internal clamp of this terminal design. A simple ferrule that produces a round crimp is the same as a solid wire and the current rating of the wire should be increased by two wires sizes. i.e. A #10 solid wire (or round crimp) can only handle as much current as a #12 when used in the Wago terminals.
The linked three position splice block is rated for 41 amps. Use with caution on high current loads.
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The few times I’ve been involved with running two motors from a single controller, we were using Jaguars or Talon SRs, so we just put two ring terminals on the output posts of the motor controller. If I were to do this with modern controllers, I’d put a crimped y-joint, likely putting the joint as close to the motor controller as feasible.
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I was wondering what y’all were talking about here for a bit.
In my head, if you’re using two BAGs on one controller, that controller is an original spark (with screw terminals) 95% of the time, and the remaining 5% is something like a Victor 888.
You’re very likely not running closed loop on that mechanism, so some nice, dumb, cheap, PWM controller works fine.
We did this for 2020. We were able to wire up a “Y” connector using Power Pole connectors. If you use the 40A crimp, you can easily fit 2 14Ga wires into the crimp before crimping. Then you just crimp the normal power pole leads on the other end. We did this as a separate wire harness so that we would not have to modify the motor controller or motor leads (which already had power poles crimped on the wires).
The 2 bag motors were used to run our conveyor system (we had upper and lower belts running in unison with one motor running the upper belts and the other motor running the lower belts). It was not critical that the motors ran at exactly the same speed, so running open loop was fine. We did have to have one motor running in the opposite direction, so we did have to reverse the polarity on one of the motors. We did this by simply plugging in the motor leads backwards (red to black, black to red).
It was a fairly low power application, so we were not worried about the breaker (I believe we used a 30A slot for this mechanism, but I might be wrong on that).
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