LED Lights and Garage Door Opener???

This may not be appropriate for this site or this section of the site so forgive me in advance if it doesn't belong here. We have a unique problem that for the life of my electronics background, doesn't make sense but its real and strange at the same time... and it's driving us bonkers!

I have two garage door openers as I have two separate garage doors. The remotes mysteriously do not work sometimes.... BOTH of them. Our alternatives are to unlock the house front door and go through the house to the garage and push the manual button. It doesn't matter which car, or remote we use, they all work or don't work at the same time (with either door).

So we were thinking it was rather odd, but both garage door openers are failing at the same time. Or something worse.

Then I realized last night that the problems occur mostly at night or specifically between dusk and dawn. Around the time that my landscape lighting comes on. The system has been in use for a couple of years but just recently I replaced all of the quartz hallogen bulbs with LED to conserve energy and cut down on bulb replacement. All of the bulbs were purchased over the internet from a variety of sources (ebay). Some of the spot lights are up to 6 watts of consumed powere so I suspect there is some circuitry involved internally. BUT it appears that once I've swapped out all of the bulbs and the system comes on at dusk, the garage door opener remotes just do not want to work. Freaky - almost like the aluminum foil hat type of thing. Can anyone explain this to me or am I thinking something that just can't happen this way.

Any advice would help - even those that think I must be smoking something (I'm not... but hey... it's still advice), Thanks, Jerome B.

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Reply to
mrjb1929
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The LED bulbs likely interfere with the garage door receivers. Try switching back to the previous bulbs, then you'll know.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat

I made the mistake of replacing the high-vibration incandescent lamps in the garage door opener with compact flourescents, since we were out of the special ones, and I figured they'd last at least as well (that part was right). And promptly forgot that I did it.

Some time later, I noticed that the door would go up from the remote control but woudn't go down except manually. A bit of a hassle, but I did it for a few months before trying to 'fix' it. Strangely, as it turned out, if you waited 5 minutes or so, the remote would once again work to make the door go down. Turns out that EMI from the lamps was overwhelming the RF front end and disabling the receiver. The lamps went off automatically from a timer, so the remote would work again.

So, yes, the LED lamps with their fine Chinese and perhaps unfiltered and unapproved high current switching power supplies could well be causing your problem even from some distance away. Nothing freaky about it. You could perhaps add some filtering or dump the lamps or improve the antenna.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Garage door openers tend to use one of several different radio bands, and are usually operated under the terms of FCC Part 15 certification. This means that (1) they're not allowed to interfere with other devices, and (2) they must accept any and all interference from other devices, whether licensed or unlicensed. They're classified as "intentional radiators" - they transmit a low-power radio signal by design.

LED lights of the sort you're talking about, probably incorporate a small "switching" power supply, to step down the mains voltage to the relatively low DC voltage needed by the LEDs themselves. These switching supplies can generate a significant amount of RF interference, which can be carried back onto the AC power lines... the manufacturers sometimes (often?) omit adding the components necessary to filter out the interfering RF noise before it gets back onto the power lines. These sorts of devices also operate under Part 15, as "incidental radiators" - they're producing RF signals as a side effect of their operation, not as an intended behavior.

What you may be running into, is a situation in which one or more of your LED lights are generating enough RF interference to "jam" the remote receiver in your garage door opener. It's as if your receivers were listening for the whistling of the tune "Yesterday" in order to operate, while sitting in the middle of a boiler factory :-)

The first thing to do, to confirm this hypothesis, would be for you to switch off all of the LED lights, and confirm that the garage door opener works. Then, turn the LED lights back on one at a time, and figure out which one (or which ones, in combination) are generating enough RF hash to block signal reception. If you can determine what frequencies your remote-control system uses, you might be able to use a radio scanner or receiver to detect the interference.

It's quite possible that some of the lights you're using don't comply with the Part 15 emission rules, and have not been tested and certificated... there are quite a few such devices on the market (mostly imports, and technically illegal to sell).

If this is your problem, then you've got a few possible ways to fix it:

- Figure out which lights are at fault. Replace them with other lights which don't generate such interference.

- Replace the garage-door remote system with one operating in a different frequency band, which isn't vulnerable to interference.

- Try filtering out the RF hash. If it's mostly being conducted over the power lines, you might be able to install an interference filter at the garage door opener's power plug. If it's mostly radiated interference, you'd have to install filters at the individual light sockets.

People sometimes run into this sort of non-operation problem from non-local causes. A large percentage of the remote-control fobs being sold in the U.S. today operate in tht 420-430 MHz radio frequency range (433.920 MHz is very common). This band of frequencies has a "primary" user - government radar installations - and around some Air Force bases, the radar signals are strong enough to jam such remote control systems for quite a few miles.

I found that the remote-control fob for my car would not work at all reliably in a local mall's parking lot. Sniffing around with a hand-held receiver led me to a local Chinese restaurant, which uses a wireless order-taking system that operates near 433.920 MHz... it's not Part 15 certified, and as I read Part 15 it's operating in a way which is quite illegal (tranmissions are much too frequent and probably too powerful).

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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Reply to
Dave Platt

Good grief, I've been having the same erratic problem: the garage door will go up but won't close. I overhauled all the mechanics, cleaned the limit switches, tweaked the big nasty dangerous spring, all that. It appears to be a control problem, not a mechanical one. And after a while it started working again. The receiver/motor box is straddled by two light sockets on the ceiling, with CFs, drived from a motion sensor. The bulbs inside the Genie housing are still incendescents.

Next time it acts up, I'll try incandescents for the ceiling lights.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

This happens to me in parking lots as well. I just assumed that it was the RF from the cameras that the business had installed outside swamping my little FOB.

Reply to
Hammy

Entirely possible, I suppose.

As I read it, Part 15 intentional-radiator transmissions in the

433.920 MHz range are supposed to be both brief, and occasonal... continuous transmission isn't allowed. A camera would probably be a serious violator, as it would likely be transmitting a large fraction of the time (perhaps continuously).

In the case of the restaurant system I found, it has a "polling" behavior - the base station sends out an inquiry transmission several times per second, and any hand-held order-taking terminal with data to send will respond. On an FM or SSB receiver, it puts out a distinctive "pokka pokka pokka" sound, with two or three reps per second.

The brand name? "Pokky" :-)

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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Reply to
Dave Platt

Some of those lights have a very cheap switching supply system, merrily transmitting a broad spectrum of radio waves, blocking your transmitter. I see two options, one, to trace-down and/or replace lights, another is to increase the antenna quality of the receivers, by using a parabolic reflector behind the antennas, or give the antennas sideways shielding, or both. Those transmitters are very low-power, and can easily be overruled by interference.

Reply to
Sjouke Burry

And sweat the day when you can't get incandescent light bulbs any more because you've been told that they are too inefficient!

I'm sure we're going to see a sharp rise in residential fires in the next 10 years, too... Mostly due to cheap chinese CFL lamps failing when used in locations that are totally inappropriate, a move forced by those who "think" they know best for everyone.

Reply to
PeterD

I'm goint to order a few cases of them, a lifetime supply, before they become illegal. I suspect there will always be an ebay black market, too.

CFs don't work in cold locations, and most can't be dimmed, and most won't work with 2-wire motion sensors.

I recently replaced one that had failed after a few months. As I was climbing down off the last rung of the ladder, the *new* one failed.

I eliminated the timer to all the lights in our stairwells at work, so they stay on all the time. The CFs last much longer that way. The good ones last for years at 100% duty cycle. The bad ones get culled out in a few weeks or months.

Next we'll have expensive LED bulbs that "last up to 100,000 hours" with crappy electronics. Nearly all the green LED traffic lights in San Francisco have failed, in interesting patterns, and had to be replaced. Only the greens, for some reason.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

I doubt that will happen, though they may well disappear from grocery store and convenience store shelves, and the price will likely go up to dollars a bulb from dimes a bulb.

Who forces consumers to buy cheap flea-market unapproved products?

We usually buy Philips brand, and they always carry the appropriate approval marks. All products with authentic (!) cULu markings (or equivalent) should not cause an excessive number of fires. One of the major contributors to home fires in the past couple of decades has been halogen lamps in poorly designed fixtures that can allow the extremely hot bulb envelope to come into contact with flammable materials. We've still got some incandescents in the dining room, but most everything else has been warm-white electronic ballast CFL for years now. They're a far cry from the flickery 100Hz ting-ting-ting-flicker-start lamps I remember from my first budget trips to Europe. I still have a bunch of ceramic-based 85W halogen floods in my office (along with some under-counter flourescents and accent MR16 halogens and LEDs) because the raw lumens for my aging eyes are just not available from equivalent CFLs.

BTW, I put CFL lamps in our mb shower a few years ago, and it seems to be working just fine. I did coat the lamp bases with silicone conformal coating before installing to protect against any steam that gets into the fixture. Nice and bright, starts instantly, and they have outlasted the incandescents by ~3:1 so far (a bit of a hassle to replace- ladder, screwdriver etc.).

Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

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I buy case lots of commercial grade 130V incandescents... standards and floods :-)

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That's odd, they seem to do quite well here in AZ. Maybe it's the fog in San Fransicko ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

I'm going to hope politicians aren't dumb enough to completely outlaw them.

This is a fair statement, but...

-- Dimmable CFLs vs. non-dimmable one is primarily a cost issue today; you can readily find dimmable ones at a Home Depot or similarly well-stocked store, but you end up paying a couple bucks more per each. Over time I wouldn't be surprised if that cost difference diminishes to the point where they pretty much all become dimmable. (Remember how some early CFLs still flickered at turn-on, using a bi-metallic strip-based starter and magnetic ballast, but that these were slightly cheaper than the all-electronic versions.)

-- I've noticed that these days some motion sensors advertise that they will, in fact, work with CFLs (and one can presume the ones that don't advertise this won't :-) ) -- I suspect the design changes amounts to a slightly bigger capacitor or something; nothing significant once the problem is well-defined. It's kinda a hack anyway to get the power for your circuitry when you're "in-line" with the controlled device; motion sensors that have their own full power connection (hot, neutral and ground) always struck me as preferable, but of course I realize this isn't easily retrofittable into existing fixtures in almost all cases. In any case, this problem as well I expect to largely disappear over time.

I'm amazed at just how expensive the LED bulbs are right now -- I remember the first CFLs being in the $20-$25 range, whereas the first big (e.g., replacement for 60+ watt incandescents) LED bulbs are more like $40-$60!

(But just so that it's clear -- I think banning incandescent bulbs is a really stupid idea, as there will always be applications where incandescents are the best option.)

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

100,000 hours at half power and low ambient temp. I see many failed lights now. greg
Reply to
GregS

I have worked with good dimmable ones in the past. I bought some Costco Feits and one failed on turn on, and the dimmable feature is a joke. Good ones are probably still near $15 a piece.

greg

Reply to
GregS

I see a lot of failing red ones around here, along with the green. Some have already been replaced once, when over half of the LEDs went dark. It's interesting to look at them through the tinted top edge of the windshield. They sure don't match them. Their intensities vary all over the place.

--
Lead free solder is Belgium's version of 'Hold my beer and watch this!'
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

The incandescent ban taking effect in stages from January 2012 to January 2014 has a set of loopholes wide enough to reroute the Mississippi river through, in my words.

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(I did hear recently that part of what I thought the 2012 stage was is now set to take effect in January 2013.)

Sadly, some incandescents will be replaced by some loopholers that are even less efficient than the ones being banned (rough/vibration service and traffic signal).

Meanwhile, most residential usage of motion sensor lights that I see uses reflectorized R or PAR or BR floodlight and spotlight incandescent lamps, which are exempt from the 2012-2014 bans. These light fixtures (typically outdoors in my experience with residential use of motion sensor lights) appear to me to be the worst place for CFLs that I can think of at this moment, except for use in ovens.

(And appliance lamps are another exemption from the 2012-2014 ban.)

Other exemptions include tubular bulbs of showcase and refrigerator and exit sign types, globular bulbs of decorative and vanity types, flame-shaped bulbs used in chandaliers, ones with design voltage outside the range of 110-130 volts (even if only outside to an extent to hold up in a court case), and ones with light output outside the range of 310-2600 lumens (I am guessing possibly both at 120 volts and at their design voltage that is in or at one end of the 110-130 volt range).

This means that low voltage incandescents including automotive incandescents and most incandescents used for indicator lamps, all common

120V incandescents of wattage 20 watts or less, and the vast majority of 25 watt 120V incandescents are exempt. Some 150 watt 120V incandescents and most 120V incandescents 200 watts or more are exempt on basis of producing more than 2600 lumens.

Incandescents with bases other than E26 and E27 are exempt from the

2012-2014 USA ban. That alone covers pretty much everything of wattage 7.0 watts or less (already exempt on basis of luminous output), the vast majority of low voltage incandescents including automotive (at least generally already exempt on basis of design voltage or luminous output or both), a majority of halogen lamps, and nearly all projector lamps.

(Many projector lamps are also exempt on basis of producing more than

2600 lumens, and a few are also exempt for being designed for design voltage of 82V requiring a diode in halfwave rectifier manner when powered by 120 volts AC.)

Incandescents exceeding an energy efficiency standard that can be met or exceeded by good usage of "HIR technology" are exempt. Philips has one or more likely two already on the market for over a year including at Home Depot, as for ones that are exempt from the 2012-2014 USA incandescent lamp ban on basis of energy efficiency and for no other reasons. These would be Philips "Halogena Energy Saver". The one producing 800 lumens from 400 watts is exempt according to all sources that I have run into. The one producing 1600 lumens from 70 watts is exempt according to most but not all sources that I have run into.

I hope I said enough already, although it appears to me that the USA

2012-2014 incandescent lamp ban has probably around 10 to a dozen, possibly more, get-arounds (mostly lesser such as "plant grow lamp", colored lamp, blacklight incandescent, bug non-attracting light, infrared, left-hand-thread screw base, marine, at least 4 others) that I did not mention above and that I do mention in above-mentioned:

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- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

My experience with LED traffic signals in Philadelphia and suburbs thereof is that the LED ones are showing their superiority.

Please keep in mind that Philadelphia gets more extreme high temperatures than much of Florida. I have already lived through merely a July 1995 day in Philadelphia fair-chance getting hotter than Miami was ever officially noted to have achieved, some chance tying Miami's record high temperature in combination with dew point that is high even for Miami!

(PHL airport or closest-to-there official weather station determined that at 4 PM "local time" July 15th the temperature was 102 F [peaking that day at a slightly different time at 103 F.])

(I have a tale or 2 to tell about atmosphere temperature at 102 F, and some cause to discount much-hotter)...

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

Municipalities in northern climates that converted to LED traffic lights are having to send work crews out to de-ice them. The LED's don't radiate enough heat to de-ice themselves.

Reply to
Hammy

This seems unlikely. LED traffic lights are efficient but to that extent there is still enough waste heat at least in the UK up to latitude 55N. It must take exceptional conditions for snow to accumulate on them.

In the US there is already a fairly simple piece of bent metal solution for wind blown snow clogging up the sun visor cowling.

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Regards, Martin Brown

Reply to
Martin Brown

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