If they want more people to use more (non-carbon-dioxide-generating) hydroelectric power instead of using extra fossil fuel for heat, they should give out electric space heaters, perhaps along with a CF ight or two (as in "we give you one or two CF bulbs, and you'll also get a free room heater!"). That would surely increase the "clean" electric power used (and charged for, and profit made).You guys are missing the point of the heat loss in winter. Read that post again carefully. Look at where the study was done and who did it. Make sense now?
If not, there are plenty of friendly Canadians here to help.
(hint: it's a local effect).
I saw this link yesterday after reading this post : Compact fluorescent lamp
It looks like not all of them use a switching supply IE -the Isotronic 11W and Luxtek 8W.
I don't know that much about the CFLs but i do think that flourescent light is one of the most important inventions. Its unbelievably more efficient and cooler -- its light years ahead of incandescent technology!
I think the next step for CFLs is to be able to just buy the bulb with the ballast and circuit in the lamp itself.. then I you would be able to buy a good lamp and know that whatever you stick in it will be fine in terms of emi etc.. also much greener.
It looks like not all of them use a switching supply IE -the Isotronic 11W and Luxtek 8W.
I don't know that much about the CFLs but i do think that flourescent light is one of the most important inventions. Its unbelievably more efficient and cooler -- its light years ahead of incandescent technology!
I think the next step for CFLs is to be able to just buy the bulb with the ballast and circuit in the lamp itself.. then I you would be able to buy a good lamp and know that whatever you stick in it will be fine in terms of emi etc.. also much greener.
One think I noticed with the CFLs. Go into the lighting dept of a big box store like Lowes or Home Depot. Remember how hot it used to be in there before with all those lights? Not any more.
OS, that looks a lot like the LED panels that are now being used in TV production. Huge cost savings in electricity and air conditioning costs.
OS, that looks a lot like the LED panels that are now being used in TV production. Huge cost savings in electricity and air conditioning costs.
They already do that , cheap "dirty" asian SMPS's , had to make a better filter for my audio until I can rid myself of this mercury filled toxic garbage. Can't put them in the ceiling fixtures the SMPS's burn out quicker than a incandescent. only have 3 CFL's in desk lamps , making sure said lamp does not use same mains circuit as audio
they gotta go.OS
VERY expensive , to match HID (high intensity discharge) , you would need 100 cree or luxeon 3W LED emitters.... expensive, they pulse (PWM) the leds for longer life and more intensity. (advanced controller)
100,000 lumens = 1000w metal halide
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
$$1995USD
300 watt LED Grow Light - 24000 lumens - MyLEDLightingGuide.com
You would need 4 of these !!!
OS
Yes and no. My house has electric baseboard heat, a horrible way to heat a house. But, both the baseboards and an incandescent bulb are 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat, as are all electric heaters. Fortunately I heat with wood or I would have gone bankrupt years ago trying to heat the house in this northern climate.
Conrad
I'm guessing the halogens operate at a higher filament temperature than older model incandescent bulbs, and thus are somewhat more efficient (a larger proportion of the energy used is radiation in the visible range - check out the spectrum of black-body radiation versus temperature). The "disadvantage" is they emit substantial ultraviolet light, due to both the higher temperature and using a quartz envelope. Apparently ordinary glass stops the more harmful ultraviolet rays, as used in the outer envelopes of the Edison-socket bulbs shown. The 12V 20-watt halogen desk lamps I have (with a base containing a transformer and on-off switch) have a piece of glass that goes over the compartment containing the halogen bulb.
Sadly LED's do not as yet cure all these problems even though we have reached pretty high efficiency designs lately.
The problem is the required drivers for higher wattage LEDS are quite hard to retrofit into a bulb design, add to that any heat being generated and not dissipated reduces luminous intensity. I have been working on a small 10W LED driver that fits in the base of a lightbulb. The problem is that the X2 rated HV caps available to clean up the act are just way too big to use. THe same design puts out alot less nasty stuff in a tube format as it provides PCB area to add things like PFC and what have you.
Do you think mains voltages will change in the future to make integrateing things like LEDs etc. easier? My LED requires 10W @ 42V at 270mA, and pushes well over a thousand lumens. Compared to a 15W cfl, camera metering shows it to require only half the exposure than with the 15W, and with far superior colour rendition. It is made by CREE but is not commercialy available yet.
There is a catch with that too, you can choose, high lm or high colour accuracy, I don't see any product on the market that offers both.
Anyway in the meantime it is still a pretty crude switchmode PSU with virtualy no external filtering. I am still amazed at the fact that they were able to design the chip running the show, directly off universal mains voltages only 3 x3mm big. But it is an unisolated design meaning you have a Mosfet and inductor connected to the mains directly.
Add to that that you can buy a box full of CFLs for the price of the LED alone, which still needs a heatsink and special clamps.
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The logic is that they are more efficient than normal incandescent lamps. And that's the whole point. More lumens per watt.
I've noticed a good bit of RFI with LEDs, too. LED traffic lights, that is. The FM radio station I listen to is 70 miles (112Km) away. The signal is OK most of the time, but at traffic lights there is often static. The static seems to come when the lights go green. Do the green LED traffic lights have noisy power supplies? Could be.
Have also noticed a similar noise coming from the LED signs that are now at so many gas stations.
My understanding is the benefit of halogen is long life, and decreased contamination of the bulb. Traditional incandescent filaments burn and release tungsten into the vacuum, where it will eventually deposit itself onto the glass. This deposit over time will cloud the glass and decrease effective lumens, as well as result in early death for the filament. So you have decreased efficiency and life.
The halogen gas in a halogen bulb actually reacts with the released tungsten gas, capturing it before it can deposit onto the glass. It then redeposits this tungsten back onto the filament because of the temperature of the filament. So you get longer life to the filament, because you have a recycling or catalyst effect on the filament. A side effect of cleaner glass is a more consistent and higher lumen output, hence higher efficiency. There is another side effect of being able to operate the tungsten hotter, so lumens per watt is marginally increased also.
Not sure if they have managed to eliminate the mercury content of flourescent bulbs, but chalk that one up to misguided environmentalism.
The halogen gas in a halogen bulb actually reacts with the released tungsten gas, capturing it before it can deposit onto the glass. It then redeposits this tungsten back onto the filament because of the temperature of the filament. So you get longer life to the filament, because you have a recycling or catalyst effect on the filament. A side effect of cleaner glass is a more consistent and higher lumen output, hence higher efficiency. There is another side effect of being able to operate the tungsten hotter, so lumens per watt is marginally increased also.
Not sure if they have managed to eliminate the mercury content of flourescent bulbs, but chalk that one up to misguided environmentalism.
The incandescent bulb IS a heater, and since the purpose is to give off light and heat in certain environments, it's 100% efficient; the light is usable (10%), the heat is usable (90%) = utilization 100%.
An electric heater is perhaps 90% efficient and the light output is unusable, so substituting two products to do the work of one, neither of which are 100% efficient, is a waste of energy. If that weren't true there would be no increase in greenhouse gas emissions and the study would reflect that.
As for what is charged for and where profits are made, the CFL bulb, with it's poor power factor, is guaranteed to result in increased utility rates, since the utility has to compensate for the power factor (generate more power per watt) while charging you as if it were a factor of 1 (that's the only way they can currently measure it at the meter). Widespread adoption of CFLs will require utilities to generate more power for the same watt delivered to your home due to the power factor. That costs the utility money and they are going to want to recover that cost.
If you operate partly or completely by generator in your home or cottage, the difference is dramatic. Hospitals and other emergency institutions are already grasping with how they will deal with the CFLs power factor under emergency conditions ... they are severely limiting CFLs to non-generator backed outlets only.
See this video comparing a generator powered CFL bank and an incandescent lamp. The difference is entirely due to the power factor and these are modern versions of the CFL, not the older transformer-coupled units that are blamed on the issue by less informed green proponents. We really should have waited for the LED to evolve a bit more ... adopting the CFL is a stop-gap measure that will only harm the evolution and per-unit costs of LED lighting for the home, since people just buy CFLs instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeCqreRMzKM
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Hello everyone, well when I started this tread I just wanted to discuss how to avoid error in measurements related to CFL and it developed much furthur than that. Well I did some more tests; and if I do measurements on open units that are not shielded, or radios, antenna or circuit will pick up something - I think it's about 64 kHz signal and strength varies - the distance from the bulbs, the equipment used and so on , but the best case scenario it was introducing the error of about 20 uV; that's the best case; quite often when antenna were involved I'd get few hundred mV.
Someone suggested to try better brand names, testing is time consuming however, so for a while I'll just continue using regular bulbs, sometime in year or two, I believe they will not be in sale anymore here in Canada. I bought some stock for now.
Someone suggested to try better brand names, testing is time consuming however, so for a while I'll just continue using regular bulbs, sometime in year or two, I believe they will not be in sale anymore here in Canada. I bought some stock for now.
No, unless you are splitting or fusing atoms, it takes 1 Joule per second (read: watt) of electricity or any other energy source to produce 1 watt of heat. Period. When it comes to making heat, there is no such thing as being more or less efficient. Even when some of the energy produces, say, light instead of heat, that light energy still becomes heat when it strikes a surface and is absorbed. Now your heating system, which is likely a natural gas furnace, is different. Some of the heat produced is thrown out with the exhaust gasses, so it is, ironically, a much less efficient heater than a light bulb.
And, yes the heat is as you say, just there due to the inefficiency of the bulb. But that is exactly what make it a completely "free" source of heat. It is similar to using the heater in your car; the car doesn't need to make extra heat for the heater, since it just uses waste engine heat that would otherwise be dissipated by the radiator. So in the winter, waste heat, whether from light bulb, or computers, or whatever else, is genuinely helpful in reducing heating costs. In the summer, however, waste heat from incandescent bulbs is a problem, as it needs to be removed by the AC.
I think that part of BC Hydro's issue with this lost heat source is that much of BC's electricity is generated by Hydro-electric dams (hence the name BC Hydro, not BC Power or BC Electric) which have less carbon footprint than the natural gas burning furnaces that will now be called upon to supply extra heat. That is (I assume) how they calculated a net increase in carbon footprint.
Good Move! CFL's don't like it cold so you will need something else for outside lights. I went to LED. The LED price was reasonable and should last the life of the structure. The voltage to current switching supply was more than the LED array by a lot and it most likely will have to be replaced when it fails.
This is my 4th generation LED light and this one is practical. My first were strings of LEDS which worked for a bit of light in the back of racks. Current limiting was done with a selected resistor and matching transfomer with a full wave bridge. Second generation used several strings with series capacitors. Third generation I built a switching current regulator after a step down wall wart transformer. This version is all switching 120 VAC in up to 24 volts out at 1.05 amps commercial product. Noise seems to be low enough but I use shielded cable on the output.
The first CFLs in use lasted about 2000 to as much as 4000 hours to failure. Today they are much cheaper and last longer.
My main lighting in my shop is an arc discharge type. 1000 watts worth to light the shop. Task lighting is standard florescent for one area, LED and incandescent for others. Item such as a drill press have had lights added aimed at the table.
I have passed all the safety inspections so far. My paint booth uses LED at low voltage and will be getting more of them. More mains with color adjustment and bluish ones for optional side lighting.
Back on topic I see noise spikes around 10K but at -140 re 1V. The older electronic ballasts worked 20-30K but got changed because they interfered with IR remotes. The older ballasts placed an inductor in series with the arc to limit current. These did shift the power factor but drew current all through the AC cycle. Modern electronic ballasts are now available to have decent power factor. The basic circuit is still AC to DC but with a small filter capacitor and a wide range input switching power supply.
As a slight side bar to the topic of "more efficient" fluorescent technologies, our 10,000 sq ft manufacturing plant was recently outfitted with new high efficiency fixtures and ballasts. We're located in the Beautiful BC which Johnny2Bad refers and this refit was sponsored by BC Hydro, and included a substantial subsidy after our payment of the well over $10,000 cost. The quality of lighting is definitely better, but the most hilarious aspect is that since all ballasts are electronic, the lack of capacitive load in old fixtures that used to offset the highly inductive loads of many heavy electric motorized manufacturing saws, edgebander, CNC router, compressors, etc. has caused our power factor to drop to well under 90%. this was never a problem in over 20yrs in 2 different locations. So while we may be using slightly less power for lighting, we're seeing a power factor surcharge varying from $50 -80 per month (approx 3% of monthly bill) . The corrective measures entail an on-site survey of individual equipment loads to determine amount(s) and location(s) of compensating capacitors. Compared to the relatively minor amounts of surcharge the payback period for the correction would be many years. Now comes the frustrating, rather than amusing(?) part - in less than a year, we've had over a dozen of the new ballasts fail, the manufacturer of which hasn't worked out warranty service arrangements with the installing electrician, who was only willing to eat the labor on the first half of failed units.
I found I had to change to the universal 120-270 volt ballasts. The 120 only units failed every year or two.
As to power factor. The idea is that a universal unit looks at the power factor and actively adjusts the capacitors to fix it. A better solution is to place some capacitors at each motor and then if still needed use a building entry unit. This not only saves energy but depending on the gear increase available torque!
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