When I had everything finally connected and all the inlets installed it was late in the afternoon and I was tired. I opened an inlet and nothing happened. Then I opened the vacpan inlet and all the inlets came on. I actually didn’t realize that all of the inlets are active when one is active.
The DC that allows the inlets to come on is connected in a “daisy chain” or the looping method. This puts all the wiring right at the inlets so that if some maintenance trouble shooting needs to be done, the wiring connections are accessible.
Daisy Chain Wiring
This seemed simple enough and I had no issues hooking up the wiring in this way. However, when the inlets did not come on when opened, I thought I had made an error in the wiring. That evening, I went back to the first few connections and thought about how to rewire them. But instead of rewiring I disconnected most of the house and just tested the vacpan and the utility inlet in the garage. Behold! I realized the utility inlet did come on when I shorted across the two metal bumps inside with a screwdriver. That turned on both inlets too. The vacpan is meant to come on without a hose connection!
So I reconnected the rest of the house and voila, the wiring worked just fine everywhere I plugged in a vacuum hose to turn on the system. I’m not sure why it didn’t make sense at first that all the inlets ran when one did. Once I figured out what was happening, it did make sense to me. All the pipe is connected to the vacuum like plumbing. When water in plumbing pipe is on all the pipe fills with water, but only the faucet that is turned on runs water. When all the vacuum pipe is sucking though, it may be possible to use more than one inlet at the same time. Although any extra openings reduce the pressure in the whole system.
I used the short vacuum hose to suck up a bit of sawdust and other dirt from the install. The suction seems very strong with the short hose. I wonder if it will be reduced much with longer hoses.
Two of the inlets have power assist. That means they can run a carpet powerhead. Older systems just used a nearby plug to power the rotating head. But the newer systems run the power right to the inlet. A separate plug in the inlet is for the electrified hose connection.
Powered Vacuum Inlet
Near each of the powered inlets was an outlet. It was a simple matter to add the wires running to the powered inlet junction boxes. I haven’t tested the power units yet.