(10) Technologies That Deserve To Die

That's a lot of lighting for a home, but not totally impossibly ridiculous. With a somewhat high-side home electricity cost (in the USA) of 12 cents per KWH, $100 per month in lighting savings means that average power consumption for lighting was reduced by approx. 1.16 kiliwatts. This could mean that there used to be - averaged over 24 hours - 1500 watts of incandescents being on, replaced by 374 watts of compact fluorescents being on. 1500 watts 24-hour average does seem to me to be a lot of incandescent lighting for a home.

Possible, but not usual. I thought a fridge that cost $30/month to operate was pretty bad, while a good one would cost (guesstimating from fuzzy memory) about $6 a month. There may be a fair number of fridges still in use that cost $15/month more than modern replacements would (do you see a return on investment here?).

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

My electrical bill was in the 280 US a month range .. lowest being 140 a month .. now it ranges (with a local 30% INCREASE in rates) between

90 on the low to 180 on the high .. I would say that using fluroescents is a substantial saving. I have 3 way in the lamps requireing same. Only those fixtures running less than a 40 watt sitll have incancescent lamps, as 40 watt is the lowest that you can buy at present in the CCF lreplacement bulbs. add to that in a two year time, I have yet to have to replace a single bulb (including outdoor porch lamps and bathroom lamps and the hood lamp over the stove top) .. and the new CCF bulbs come with a 7 year warantee.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@manx.misty.com mentioned...

I see your point. But ask Jim T, who lives out there in the Arizona Desert, what his electric bill is. See, some people _have_ to use air conditioning. If they reduce the electric consumption inside the house, the a/c has less work to do to get rid of the heat inaide the house. So the overal savings is greater than the light consumption alone. What that extra amount is, I couldn't tell you. But it *is* really there. And in a case of a home that has central air, it could be substantial.

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In article , snipped-for-privacy@worldnet.att.net mentioned...

And on top of that, some municipalities and electric co's give a rebate that can help out, and is worth applying for.

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How much electricity is consumed by air conditioning to pump out a given amount of heat: 3.4 times the amount of heat (in watts) divided by the EER. The EER will probably differ a little from what is specified since it varies with indoor and outdoor temperatures. EER should generally decrease as temperature difference between indoors and outdoors increases. I seem to remember that 17 is realy excellent and 14 is fair or good (that is, the rated EER, which I imagine is under some standard set of test conditions). If the EER is 10, then you need 34 watts to pump out

100 watts of heat. If your EER is 17, then it takes 20 watts to pump out 100 watts of heat.

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

[snip]

Meter read date 9/19/2003: 7136kWh --> $561.35

(Time of use metering: 1779kWh On-Peak, 5357kWh Off-Peak)

Two 60,000Btu A/C units. Individual SubZero in-wall freezer and refrigerator. U-Line Wine refrigerator ;-) Electric kitchen (indoors), propane outside (Spehro has seen it :)

1.5hp pool pump runs 12 hours per day in summer time. Solar pool heating but electric heat-pump for spa. Water fall pump running 24/7 Washer + Electric Dryer 5 computers running 24/7 6 TV sets Salt water fish tank pump runs 24/7 Ceiling fans in every room, most running 24/7 Lots of lighting, all incandescent, except garage. (Lots of interior lighting is flood lights in ceilings, some as high as 18', so I'm interested in replacements that have longer life AND high light output.)

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Your post completely misses the point. He claimed

100 dollar savings for one month. His post implies that the savings for that month were due to changing his lights. I asked him for HIS numbers. I want to see if he really thinks the 100 dollar savings was due solely to the lighting change, and how he arrives at that conclusion.

A similar fix happened after WW2 when the German V2 rockets were brought to White Sands. Some had mysterious mods which got applied to some of the rest. The German workers asked why the changes were being made, since in Germany these were to facilitate the rockets passage thru tunnels. These were not required stateside.

The story is buried somewhere in one of my books on rocketry. Think it may be the one by Willy Ley. Cheers, John Stewart

How do I know what?

I don't question that the bill could drop 100 - what I question is the implication that the 100 dollar drop was due to changing his lighting. I do not believe it - so I asked him for numbers.

I have a high rate - 13.5 cents/kWh. 100 dollars translates to ~740 kWh at that rate. Thats a huge amount of lighting wattage to save in a month - about 1000 watts of lighting for each and every hour in a 31 day month (744 hours). Figuring lighting peak usage is about 8 hours per day, it is even more difficult to believe that a 100 dollar savings can be achieved by lighting conversion. He may have a higher rate - I've heard of a rate of almost 26 cents per kWh - and he may have a huge amount of lighting - I don't know. But he can post the numbers

- how many lights he converted and the wattage savings for each light would give a starting point, and any other numbers he has may complete the picture. He may have done an analysis to identify how much he saved by the lighting conversion - or he may merely have seen his bill drop and not determined what part the lighting played in making it drop.

No one in this thread thought to mention the awful things all these new non-linear loads do to the power system. That includes pretty well all lighting (not Tungsten), data processing, variable speed drives, Etc.

Lighting is a large part of the load & has very large effect on your local power utility. The worst offender is the 3rd harmonic of the load current. In a 3-phase system which may appear to be balanced the 3rd harmonic adds in the return lead & in some cases is larger than any of the fundamental

loads in the power system. The problem is addressed by derating transformers & a number of slick connexions in the system. Lots of problems.

Used to be you would only see this sort of thing if you were dealing with a load that needed lots of DC such as a street railway, ball mill or electric furnace. Now the problem is everywhere.

Cheers, John Stewart

I assume the high-low difference is seasonal? Heating and/or air conditioning related? Your low delta is 140 to 90, so that's a 50 dollar difference. How many incandescants at what wattage did you replace? How many "rating watts" did you save per replacement, based on the wattage of the incandescent vs the wattage of the fluorescent?

On Sun, 26 Oct 2003 16:39:20 -0700, Jim Thompson Gave us:

Just keeping the monitors OFF when not in use (not just green mode... I mean OFF) will save several tens of dollars a month, if they are CRT types.

Many compact fluorescesnts are not good for the heat buildup in recessed ceiling downlights.

Some that are:

1. Philips SLS 15 and 20 watt. R30 and R40 snap-on reflectors are available, and these lamps are available with these reflectors included. I have not actually tested these, but I imagine that the R40 works (with the 20 watt SLS) almost as well as a 70 watt halogen or 75 watt incandescent wide flood, while the R30 is more seriously compromised by its smaller size. Both are probably better where you have them spread out over the ceiling so that the beams merge and it does not matter as much how well defined the beams are.

1. Replace the fixtures with ones made for CF lamps, and that have their own ballasts (as opposed to ballasts being in the lamp bases.) I see enough dual-13-watt and really impressive dual-26-watt ones in office buildings. NOTE - these have a wide beam spread, wider than that of most floods.

3 (less preferred) 9 watt PL/twintube with screw-in ballast. These I have seen in recessed ceiling fixtures and they hold up, but I doubt this will make enough light.

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

We had some a/c air handlers converted to variable drive. The Danfoss boxes that drive the motors causes this high pitched screeching that's irritating to the ears. I'm sure some of it gets back into the power lines.

I've noticed that the single return lead for all three phases sometimes has several volts difference betwen it and the ground lead.

I'd think that PF correcton and newer electronic ballasts would be better at reducing this problem.

As for data processing, I would guess that the loads od servers etc are completely isolated from commercial power by a large UPS. Although, of course the UPS might be the problem...

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When I'm up in the ceiling I see a lot of light coming from all the holes in those chromed fixtures with the U tubes in them. Must be to let heat out into the ceiling, to prevent buildup.

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On Sun, 26 Oct 2003 19:47:25 -0500, the highly esteemed John Stewart enlightened us with these pearls of wisdom:

That is why power factor correction is such a big deal. It fixes most of the problems you mentioned. Most (if not all) electronic ballasts use it - if they didn't, imagine what impact a large building full of them would have. Imagine what the utility bill would be if the building had a power factor watt-hour meter!

I wonder how long it will be before the utilities start fitting homes with such meters. With all the electronics that people have these days, and all of it using conventional rectified supplies with no power factor correction, people will be in shock when they get their electric bills after such a meter is installed :-)

--
Greg

  --The software said it requires Win2000 or better, so I installed Linux.

This is a point were there is a lot of misunderstanding. By its very nature, power factor (PF) correction is frequency selective. The correction capacitor used if it is provided at all is that which brings the PF of that load to equal one at the power frequency. Does nothing for the harmonics. They are all still there. In a simple non-linear load the 3rd harmonic is dominant. However, there are many other odd order (5th, 7th, Etc) present as well.

In the power system itself there are other PF caps installed, often at transformer stations (TS), sometimes on poles closer to the load. You can often see them from outside the fence at a TS. They are there to minimize the reactive currents in the transformers. Only the current which is in phase with the fundamental voltage of the power system does useful work. The rest, including that due to the harmonics is dissipated as heat, some of it in the TS transformers. The harmonics in the system at the load can also induce circulating currents in other equipment at the load. In other words, the PS in your PC will generate harmonic currents which will show up in your refrigerator!!

An occasional fault can occur in a power system when the power factor capacitors resonate with inductive reactance's in another part of the system to which they are connected. However, this does not happen at the power frequency, but rather at one of the harmonics mentioned above. There are documented cases of failures where the system was excited into oscillation by harmonics of the load at say the 13th or 17th of the power frequency. If the harmonics were not there, the failure would not be triggered.

There are industry standards such as IEEE-519 & IEC-555 which define limits of harmonic generation in products to be used in power systems. Also, definitions of derating systems for transformers.

In article , snipped-for-privacy@sympatico.ca mentioned... [snip]

I'm not sure why this is so. It seems to me that the capacitors would act as a low pass filter to bypass the higher harmonics. I can understand that the capacitor's reactance may be cancelled out by the inductance on the line, but still, reducing the inductive reactance should also reduce the impedance that higher harmonics see, and reduce their levels.

I can hear the buzz of the harmonics when I use my tone tracer to trace down the datacomm and telecomm lines. The buzz gets especially bad when the tracer is near a fluo light.

[snip]

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###Got a Question about ELECTRONICS?   Check HERE First:###
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Don't be ripped off by the big book dealers.  Go to the URL
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http://www.everybookstore.com  You'll be glad you did!
Just when you thought you had all this figured out, the gov't
changed it: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html@@t@h@e@@a@f@f@l@u@e@n@t@@m@e@e@t@@t@h@e@@E@f@f@l@u@e@n@t@@

dominant.

A fluorescent lamp can generate noise above 4 GHz. I use one as a noise source to test C-Band LNAs, LNBs, and LNCs.

--


Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida