Power Outage Situations

This article will overview how our systems will react to a power outage occurring, and what actions it will take when power is restored.

How Our Systems Respond

Our Ra3 and QSX systems have a few features regarding power outage situations and what they do when power is restored. These features will affect Timeclocks and the zones/loads of the system when power is restored dependent on if the devices power on prior to the processors booting back up.

How are Timeclocks Affected?

By default, any Timeclock events that were meant to trigger when the system was offline will not automatically trigger. This, however, can be triggered via programming a button within Lutron Designer to affect a Timeclock with the settings “Enable and run missed events”.

How are Zones Affected? (Homeworks Only)

Zones may be affected depending on the type of equipment in use.

If a Din Rail Module (DPM) is used, then the zones should return to their last level upon powering back on. This behavior can be adjusted via the Loads menu and changing the “Power On Level”. As a note, if this is modified, the devices will ignore the last level they were on and will always set the zones to that specific percentage in the case of power loss. This may result in lights turning on during the night when they were originally off.

If Remote Power Modules (RPM) are used, then the devices will utilize the ‘Emergency’ settings on the project if they power on prior to the processor fully booting up. This can be adjusted by modifying the ‘Emergency’ setting on the zones within the Loads menu. This behavior can cause incidents where a client might experience the lights ‘flash on’ to 100% before returning to their last level if left in it’s default No(100%) setting.

You can ensure all future loads created have a specific setting by changing the default settings within your Project Settings > Loads menu. This setting will need to be changed for each Load Type being used. This will only affect new zones created.

Note: Emergency affects zones on a DPM differently, as it will affect what happens when the Emergency Contact Closure on the unit is opened.

How are Other Programming Affected?

Unique cases such as Contact Closures, Sequences, and Variables are affected a bit differently in terms of power outages.

• Contact Closures will reset to their Normally Open or Normally Closed state.
• Sequences will reset to their initial step in a Stopped state.
• Variables will return to their Default State.

What if Not All Processors Lost Power?

If some processors lose power while others do not, the system may continue to fire its Timeclock Events. The reason for this is due to the system relying on a single processor to send Timeclock’s Preset Events to the other processors.