series wiring question

[PennSteve]

Hey Everyone,

I've been trying for a while to find an answer to this question, but either it's not there or I'm just no good at finding these things. I've read plenty about series versus parallel wiring, and I understand the differences both from a how-to standpoint and from an Ohm's law / current / voltage / resistance standpoint.

But here's what I don't understand: if I wire two or more squibs (of whatever variety) in series, as soon as one fires it's going to break the circuit. So the same scenario that offers the benefit of the continuity test ALSO introduces the liability that a single point of failure (or, well, operation) shuts the whole thing down. Has anyone ever seen this? There must be some differences from one E-match to the next, or from one initiator to the next, or whatever; if you pull 10 out of the same batch, they'll all have slightly different impedances, right?

Any / all insight would be greatly appreciated-

[Merolis]

Parallel wiring works better if you are only doing around 3 devices per cue. You lose the ability to see a bad e-match, but there is less risk of a mishap causing only part of the chain to fire or losing the chain entirely due to some wire getting cut or pulled. If you need to do alot of e-matches at once, that requires a series connection, but realistically you should be using different cues on a firing module. If a module is almost entirely wired with many e-matches per cue, you should get another firing module.

If you need to do a series run with many devices, all the e-matches should be the same, and I would do a few test runs outside with just the e-matches to make sure they fire. E-match is cheap enough that you can test the batch yourself to see if it works before trying it in a display. If you want to bake in extra resistance to failure, you can wire 2 matches in parallel and series chain those together so a single match doesn't break the chain, but check the math.

A firing system wasn't designed to fire an entire show off a single cue, and the systems can typically chain fire multiple cues at time increments invisible to the human eye. Some E-matches are terrible when placed in combinations but usually function fine when 1to1 in a module, other times you can consistently light off a chain of 3-5 items off. Based on experience, I typically would do parallel e-matches for like a comet left/right/center, but otherwise let the firing system internally do the heavy lifting on a 5x/10x/etc cue.