Beware: CFL duds - Page 3

Hell yes! You've hit the nail right on the head, Phil.

Over the last year I have been troubleshooting designs for LED lamps,
for a Chinese company. My favourite was the 230V self-oscillating
off-line flyback converter using an MPSA42. Yep, not joking. And the
transformer saturated on every cycle, too. > 100% failure rate on that
"design". The space is very small, and gives rise to some frightening
manufacturing processes.

Whats really scary is the name of the large European company (wot makes
its own semiconductors) that gets put on these things. I've read the
specification documents, they are all about optical output and
degradation, "they" care not a jot about whats inside the package.

And I'm sick of bloody CLFs that go bang the first time you turn them
on. None of the chinese engineers I've met have known what Ifsm is,
perhaps thats why.

Cheers
Terry

"Terry Given"




** Ah soo,  Mr Given  -   so you have already met with our esteemed circuit
design engineering team:

The honourable  " Won Bung Lung " ,  his colleague  " Hoo Fung Dung"  and
loyal assistant "  Won Hung Low" .

All of them, most recent  *honours* graduates of the SSDP  =  Shanghai
School of Design Plagiarism.

Our company motto:

" Quality Control is something the Customer Does for Us "





.......   Phil

ROTFLMAO! You've obviously met them too.

BUT they were insanely quick. I sketched up a little inrush tester for
them (400Vdc and a FET switched with a DIY scr to give a nice fast step
of peak volts), and half an hour later they were testing units....

Cheers
Terry

    Is that where the expression "fried lights" comes from?

Bob

It flied lice. Unplug you tens unit.(grin!)


Actually the light on my desk lamp uses an AS/NZ standard designed
fleuro  and its OK so far. The standards would be nice to get hold of.
Standard number AS/NZ60968 2001 so lets google it to see the bigger
picture. So there are standards for these things...Just as I figured
another standard applied in Singapore. Knowing that country to be
corrupt, why didnt we use our (corrupt) standards? ((whoops We cant say
that in a democratic country)

http://www.electricitycommission.govt.nz/pdfs/opdev/elec-efficiency/CFL-stds.pdf

Nage Shi Chou Fan. Women Sha!


http://www.electricitycommission.govt.nz/pdfs/opdev/elec-efficiency/CFL-stds.pdf


thats all well and good. the real problem is that inherent with power
electronics: once the design "works" (and many of these may not), actual
reliability is governed by the purchasing and manufacturing processes.

I've gutted a few DOA CFLs, and the internals are a lot less than
impressive. In particular creepage and clearance can be ridiculously low
(all working, no safety), so condensation can be a real killer. then
there's the shitty soldering etc.

Cheers
Terry

Yes, plus the lower power they consume compared to the lamps.
This caused a major problem with the old traffic control boxes when they started
switching over a while back. The boxes are designed to detect lamp failure and
they had a real problem with the LED lamps. The LED lamp housing had a
transformer in it, so it was being driven from the AC mains, at a very low
current through cables that had a lot of noise on them.

"swanny"



**  Absolute  BOLLOCKS  !!




.......   Phil

**Points:
* I never LEDs were "no good".
* Coloured LEDs are significantly more efficient than incandescents and they
last pretty much forever. Those attributes do not apply to white LEDs.
* We are discussing general illumination, for homes, not traffic lights.



**MUCH longer life. It saves the gummint heaps.



**Yep. Coloured LEDs are much more efficient than incandescents, combined
with a colour filter.

 Is the government also being lied to as


**Nope. You just haven't properly analysed the reality of life and the
correct and APPROPRIATE uses of LEDs. For room illumination (the topic we
are discussing) LEDs are shite.

"Trevor Wilson"




**  Here are the latest and best performing white LED arrays:

http://www.electronicproducts.com/ShowPage.asp?Filename=hlap09.jul2006.html


No significant energy saving is mentioned  -  long life is the obviously
biggie.



.......   Phil

**Indeed. Very impressive, though I'd like to know how they keep the damned
thing cool. 600 Lumens from a 25 Watt LED array is nice, 'till you work out
that the same light output can be obtained from a 6 Watt Fluoro. Wait 'till
halides start going mainstream. They're already used in high end automobiles
and they are even more efficient than fluoros. Very long lasting and robust
too.

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:30:01 +1100, "Phil Allison"



Yeah, I've run into plenty of duds too.

But my main problem with the CFLs is that you only get full brightness
out of them on the first day. They seem to get dim *really* fast, &
fade to near uselessness after a few months.

You've only just bought your first CFL? You can light your whole house with
100watts (and then drive to work and use 100,000 watts).

Michael

"Michael C"
 "Phil Allison"



** No way.

The first one I bought was 20 years ago, had an iron ballast inside it !

Musta bought about 10 more since then -  none of them worth the money.




.......   Phil

Yes bloody heavy buggers they were.



I've bought even more than that, all for one single light socket. Would have
been far cheaper to put in a proper tube fitting in the first place, as I
have done in some other spots. Even though I kept hoping for an improvement,
they just seem to get worse!

MrT.