Electronics > Beginners

ABC News posted a story re: Jacked Mains Voltage is increasing power bills

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james_s:
I haven't really noticed an issue with sealed fixtures, some of my longest lived lights are in fully enclosed fixtures. A couple of them outside where I was routinely getting ~8000 hours out of CFLs and the current LEDs I don't know because they've been installed since 2011 and none have failed yet running dusk till dawn every night. The thing that helped the CFL life greatly was infrequent starts. Incandescent I have a hard time believing a fully enclosed fixture would significantly affect the lifespan but it's been so long since I've used a standard incandescent lamp I don't even know anymore. I phased them out fully almost 20 years ago and it always surprises me when I hear of someone still using them for general illumination.

bitseeker:
That story was a hoot. Thanks for sharing. Is ABC trying to compete with Bloomberg to make the biggest fluff news? :-DD

Bloomberg still wins, though.

Kasper:

--- Quote from: schmitt trigger on November 09, 2018, 12:02:21 am ---Or he's got a hemp farm in his basement.

--- End quote ---
:-+
A well air conditioned one.

timenutgoblin:
i tried the idea of using a transformer to increase/decrease the mains AC voltage at the GPO and realised that the net effect is that not only does the appliance consume energy in order to operate but the transformer also consumes energy in order to produce an EMF that can then push against the mains AC voltage at the GPO to power the appliance resulting in more energy being consumed overall than simply powering the appliance directly from a GPO without the transformer.

in principle yes lowering the mains AC voltage may reduce the energy consumption of an appliance but using a transformer to achieve this is uneconomical. YMMV...

Berni:
You can adjust the mains voltage with a transformer quite efficiently if you use a trick.

If you want to turn 230V into 220V what you can do is take a 220V to 10V transformer, connect the primary to the input 230V but then connect the secondary in series with the input. Depending on the phasing you then get 220V or 240V on the other side.

All the actual power is flowing trough the thick wire secondary of the transformer. On a small 40VA transformer would be designed for 4A 10V. So we can have 240V 4A on the output and that's 960VA. So you are using a 40W rated transformer to transform 1kW. Not much heat is produced and you can use a bigger more overrated transformer to reduce losses further.

This trick however only works for small voltage differences. If you tried to turn 110V into 220V then your transformer would need to be rated for 500VA to handle 1000VA of output. But for the purpose of regulating mains you only really need +/- 30V of adjustment range. Just add a circuit that adjusts the voltage and phase going into the transformer primary and you can vary your 220V mains from 190V to 250V for 10kW output with a device the size of a shoe box.

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