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EL Wire Inverter
I purchased three new small "blue-cube" EL wire inverters from coolight.com and had a dickens of a time getting them to work. Read all about it!
I just got some little blue-cube EL wire inverters from CooLight.com. The one I wanted to use, which was the smallest of the three (CL-ISC-12V-10-20FT, aka CL-ELI ISC 400-600CM DC12v) I purchased, was a little ambiguous.
Important note: the picture that accompanies the listing at aforementioned coolight.com product page is incorrect. It shows the 100-250cm box (which is what I wanted) but they will send you, instead, the 400-600cm box. Through sheer luck I found the correct picture of the 12v 400-600cm box also incorrectly attached to the 9v 10-20ft inverter. COME ON GUYS. THIS WEB STUFF ISN'T THAT HARD.Anyway. The little blue box I got had leads coming out of two different sides, as expected (one is the 12vdc wire, the other is the high-voltage ac line). Unfortunately, the manufacturer must have run out of red/black wire because both leads used the same black wire (one conductor of each had "negative line" markings) so I had no idea which side was high-voltage and which side was 12vdc. One set of leads did have a quick-connector in-line. Since I knew these little inverters should never be powered unless they're attached to load (attached to a bunch of EL wire) I deduced that the side with the quick-connect was the 12vdc side (because you would never want to uncouple a powered inverter from its load). Well - that assumption was wrong.
As an aside, I wasted a frustrating half-hour trying to get any set of inverter and length of el wire to properly function because one of the alligator-clip test leads I was using was faulty. Who expects alligator clips to go bad? Who thinks to do continuity testing on alligator-clips? If I had to do this professionally I'd go mad.In the end, I tried all combinations of high-voltage/12vdc on the little blue inverter and eventually found the correct combination (it was, of course, the last combination I could possibly have tried). Here's the totally non-intuitive answer in case you've been experiencing the same problem:
- The leads with the quick-connect are the high-voltage leads (polarity is irrelevant since it's alternating current).
- The other side, then, is 12vdc; but the conductor with the negative markings is actually the positive lead.
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