connecting multiple OC sensors to same load

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electrofelon

electrofelon

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Location
Cherry Valley NY, Seattle, WA
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Electrician
Say you have a long hallway and want, say, three OCC sensors where any one sensor will turn on the lights. It seems you could just bring the load wire off each sensor and splice them all together and then to the lights. I know I have done this before, where I wanted a manual override switch for a photo or motion sensor. Lutron Says you cant do this in the destructions, and I actually talked to Lutron tech support and the guy said "It will not work, they will fight each other". Am I missing something here? Obviously with the arrangement if sensor A goes off, it will send power to the load side of the other sensors, but I cant see that that would matter or hurt the sensor, regardless of whether its on or off. Like I said I have done this before, just not with these specific OC sensors. I guess one could argue its a paralleling conductors smaller than 1/0 violation whenever more than once sensor is activated, but anything else I am missing?
 
Would be easier to just use a master, and have the rest as slaves using low voltage sensors. The master controls a power pack and relay. Sensorswitch and others have this system.
 
If it is dry contact output devices there is no reason it shouldn't work. Those will have line, load and neutral terminals/leads. Any sensor gets triggered and it will close contact between line and load. All need to stop sensing motion and last one needs to finish time out before lights go off.

If it is just a two wire device, might not (probably won't) work so well.
 
In my reply to your other post about OC sensors I provided the following link to instructions for the Lutron LOS-SIR series of occupancy sensors switches. In the schematic for 3-way operation they show the outputs of two sensor switches tied together.


With multiple Lutron LOS-SIR OC sensor switches there doesn't have to be a control wire like that in the Maestro system to communicate for 3-way, etc. operation, because a manual OFF function is not required. There's just an "auto" OFF after the set time has expired. And so even if multiple OC sensor switch outputs are connected together, eventually all of them will turn OFF and the common output will also be OFF (as kwired mentioned above, I just noticed). But just one of them needs to be turned ON for the common output to be ON.
 
Thanks for the thoughts. So I went ahead and tried it and it worked fine. The lutron tech support guy was LYING! Its a OPS5MH. It's odd to me that they can be setup as a "three way" with the sensor on one end, and a three-way switch on the other end. I don't even know what the point of that would be. in my mind, if you want an occupancy sensor, then you want an occupancy sensor and don't really care about manual control, but that is maybe why lutron says what I did won't work, because you lose manual control -well you can go to each one and turn them off, but of course you have to hit every single one before the lights would go off.
 
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