What firmware on the Chilis and cgminer version?
Power cycling it will bring the draw back down to the few watt mark again, whether you wait a couple seconds or a couple hours.
On startup the board measures three sensors and waits for them to cool if needed before enabling the chips; the internal temperature of the VRM chip (30C), the temperature of the sensor near the FETs (37C) and the internal sensor of the thermal diode measurement chip (30C). Once those have dropped and settled it uses that information to calibrate the thermal diodes on the ASICs, which can vary quite a bit from chip to chip. So long as your ambient temperature isn't very close to or over 30C, it should start.
The Firmware version is the 1.1volt limited version you sent out a while back... The Cgminer version.. I'll have to tell you when I get home and can check.. It was built right around the same time so its roughly 6 weeks old I suppose.
I tried to run bfgminer, but for some reason it doesn't see the chiles... Same setup and cgminer sees them just fine (on my laptop bfgminer sees them just fine so maybe I am doing something wrong there.. that's entirely possible.)
I am going to test, shutting the miner down for 10 seconds and timing how long they take to come back..
I am also going to test if there is a difference with the pi's on or off during the reboot of the miners.
Thanks