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Registered Member #99
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:10PM
Location: florida, usa
Posts: 637
Ash Small wrote ...
EEYORE wrote ...
First you'll need to calculate just how much your lighting usage is costing you...
Then you'll be able to better determine how much a possible solution is worth.
Yes, but it is the only area where any saving is possible.
I do agree that your advice re AC and heating is relevant, but I don't use electricity for either.
Any savings from lighting will likely be so minuscule that it won't be worth the trouble or investment in hardware, unless you have equipment already such as a solar panel sitting around.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
I think broadly speaking this is true. If you want to save electricity, the first thing to do is stop using it for heating.
Like many households in the UK, I have gas-fired heating and hot water. (Nobody has air con.) However the oven, washing machine and dishwasher have electric heaters in them. There is also an electric heater in the bathroom because the previous owner of the house installed a stupid chrome plated radiator that hardly gives off any heat and it gets freezing in winter. :( These four appliances probably account for about 80% of the electric bill.
At another building I help to maintain it's a different story. The heating and hot water are all electric, and there is a large room with over 1000 watts of incandescent lighting.
Parting thought: In the UK, electricity now costs about £0.10 per kilowatt hour. A 100 watt light bulb costs something like £0.75 to buy (if you could even buy them any more after the EU ban) and lasts 2000 hours during which time it'll use £20 worth of electricity.
You might feel happier investing more of that £20 up front in a high-tech bulb. Say you pay £10 for a super LED one that lasts 20,000 hours. But do bear in mind that all low-energy lamps have inflated claims of light output. The makers would have you believe that 1 watt of low energy is equal to 5 watts of regular incandescent, but in truth it's more like a 1:3 ratio.
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
Steve Conner wrote ...
I think broadly speaking this is true. If you want to save electricity, the first thing to do is stop using it for heating.
Like many households in the UK, I have gas-fired heating and hot water. (Nobody has air con.) However the oven, washing machine and dishwasher have electric heaters in them. There is also an electric heater in the bathroom because the previous owner of the house installed a stupid chrome plated radiator that hardly gives off any heat and it gets freezing in winter. :( These four appliances probably account for about 80% of the electric bill.
At another building I help to maintain it's a different story. The heating and hot water are all electric, and there is a large room with over 1000 watts of incandescent lighting.
Parting thought: In the UK, electricity now costs about £0.10 per kilowatt hour. A 100 watt light bulb costs something like £0.75 to buy (if you could even buy them any more after the EU ban) and lasts 2000 hours during which time it'll use £20 worth of electricity.
You might feel happier investing more of that £20 up front in a high-tech bulb. Say you pay £10 for a super LED one that lasts 20,000 hours. But do bear in mind that all low-energy lamps have inflated claims of light output. The makers would have you believe that 1 watt of low energy is equal to 5 watts of regular incandescent, but in truth it's more like a 1:3 ratio.
I think last time I checked my bill it was ~£0.17 per kWH. I've recently invested in some 95 Watt equivalent LED 'bulbs', which use ~20 watts. Efficiency seems to be on a par with CFL's, but the light seems more 'natural', and they are supposed to last a lot longer, but 20 Watts for ~1300 Lumens seems quite high to me, but then I assume that the base contains resistors (I'll hopefully have to wait quite a while before one 'fails', and I can take it apart). Hence my interest in designing a system with no resistors (or, at least, one that wastes a lot less power across resistors).
Inductors will be required, and these need to be 'low resistance'. I made more progress on my design yesterday, and hope to post my latest LTSpice simulation results in 'the other thread' later today.
(I do have a fridge/freezer and washing machine as well, but the only area where I think savings are possible is lighting, in my case.)
Registered Member #3215
Joined: Sun Sept 19 2010, 08:42PM
Location:
Posts: 780
I have some IKEA 8W light bulbs which are as bright as regular 75W incandescent or 60W halogen bulbs
Same thing for 240V spotlight rails, the replacement of the 50W halogen bulbs with a 4W LED bulb led to a brightness similar to a 35W halogen so the benefit of W per lumen is still clear for me
The only reason I mentioned IKEA is the price of their bulbs which is at least 2/3rd of a brand new phillips one which is similar in specs and quality for me
Another real plus is the vibrational resistance, and surge resistance, as I live in a region where there are major quarries with huge spikes on the grid and huge trucks on the roads, and also quarry explosions which make plates and glasses shake in the house, and a broken filament is something quite current here (at my parent's house we used to replace at least two bulbs a month)
Registered Member #941
Joined: Sun Aug 05 2007, 10:09AM
Location: in a swedish junk pile
Posts: 497
Like i said in the "powering leds from mains" thread. El cheapo noname china led lamps(the ones at your average grocery store) uses a capacitive or resistive divider while the more expensive higher quality ones uses a small SMPS(the ones you buy at proper electrical and lighting oriented stores).
Registered Member #1749
Joined: Fri Oct 10 2008, 02:04AM
Location: Claremont New Hampshire
Posts: 497
I have had some cheap LED night lights that have melted I don't advise using non SMPS the term Wasting Energy in heat is unappealing for a nigh light in your child's room it is bad enough they smell the occasional smoke from a burnt wire in some of my projects but inhaling the smoke all night is a different story. And I would not know what to do if a fire ever started I think what Ash Small should do is aim for safety as well good luck.
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
Steve Conner wrote ...
Any half-decent LED bulb you buy should have a tiny switched mode converter inside.
LED lamps have a major problem just getting rid of the heat from the LEDs themselves without adding heat from resistors.
Experimentonomen wrote ...
Like i said in the "powering leds from mains" thread. El cheapo noname china led lamps(the ones at your average grocery store) uses a capacitive or resistive divider while the more expensive higher quality ones uses a small SMPS(the ones you buy at proper electrical and lighting oriented stores).
Chris Cristini wrote ...
I have had some cheap LED night lights that have melted I don't advise using non SMPS the term Wasting Energy in heat is unappealing for a nigh light in your child's room it is bad enough they smell the occasional smoke from a burnt wire in some of my projects but inhaling the smoke all night is a different story. And I would not know what to do if a fire ever started I think what Ash Small should do is aim for safety as well good luck.
These came from Homebase. Around £5 each.
I'm thinking SMPS or some transformer based solution would probably have advantages over the inductor/capacitor/diode circuit I'm currently working on. It would certainly be a lot smaller. My main interest in the circuit I'm working on at the moment is to see if losses can be minimized by using big, expensive components. I'll at least then have a 'benchmark' to compare other designs with. Maybe I should start with 'what's already out there', but, if nothing else, 'blue sky thinking' always leads to some interesting googling and experiments, all of which is generally very educational, even if all you learn is 'why your idea won't work'.
I'll post my latest simulations over the weekend, hopefully, in 'the other thread'. They are looking a lot more promising.
EDIT: All they available alternatives seem to get 'hot' in one way or another. Some are better than others. This type of 'comparison' comment is relevant to this thread. I'm looking at how much you need to spend in order to get a 'cooler' system, with less losses.
Registered Member #3414
Joined: Sun Nov 14 2010, 05:05PM
Location: UK
Posts: 4245
If anyone is interested, I found a 'millicandella to lumens' calculator online:
You just input the millicandella output of an LED, along with the beam angle, both in the datasheets, and it converts it to the equivalent value in Lumens, which might help when comparing various proposed LED setups to 'commercially available' low energy lights.
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Line Voltage from poll transformer being stepped down efficiency?
