Ranco Wiring

I have had a couple questions regarding this, so I figured I would make a quick post with a picture.



shows the inside of the Ranco controller. In the picture the power comes in from the front of the two wires and the fridge plugs into the back (not that it matters). If you take an extension cord and cut it at an appropriate place you can then wire it such that:

The black wire from the part that plugs into the wall gets a wire nut or solder to split it into two. One of those goes into the switch portion of the relay (the back terminal block) the other one goes into the controller power (front terminal block).

The black wire from the part where the freezer will plug into goes into the switch portion of the relay next to the other black wire.

The white wires from both sides need to be tied together with an additional piece of wire which will go to the controller power portion of the terminal block. (common)

The green wires need to be tied together.


for a larger view.

Hope this helps.

I just wired one of these up myself yesterday. A tip that I saw (and used) on the person's website that I based my wiring on was to tie a knot in the extension cord inside the box so that if the cord gets pulled, it's pulling against the knot rather than the screw terminals.

Gets kinda crowded in there if you do that though, so my green wire is the only one that has a wire nut. I joined my two whites and my two blacks into their respective screw terminals rather than pulling it off of a third short jumper like they suggest in the Ranco doc.

Anyway, I was glad to have found folks like yourself posting pictures of what works. It's a simple looking electrical diagram in their documentation, but I was second-guessing myself a little.

The wiring outlet will also accept one of the regular electrical box clamp connectors like these:
http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=productDetail&productId=44996-15527-C-500&lpage=none

Heh... That never crossed my mind. I've probably got a few of those in the garage even. Time to purge out a few more weak brain cells..........

jas0420 said:

... tie a knot in the extension cord inside the box so that if the cord gets pulled, it's pulling against the knot rather than the screw terminals...

Click to expand...

Or, you could just use one of these.....

http://www.acehardware.com/product/...cp&kw=strain+relief&origkw=strain+relief&sr=1

Ha. Got beat to it. Sorry for the double suggestion

Yeah, it wouldn't hurt to put some kind of strain relief in there. I had a bag of those laying around, but couldn't find them at the time I wired it up, and then I never got around to fixing it.