| General > General Technical Chat |
| Fix the voltage campaign (Australia) |
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| floobydust:
The utility industry here uses higher voltages (~124V) as a cover up for an aging infrastructure. With growth in population, industrial usage etc. demand has increased, power factor has also degraded and utilities just want to make money. Power plants are multi-billion dollar projects, new HV power lines, transformers as well are very costly. With coal being demonized, natural gas frowned upon and all the environmentalists dreaming about solar and wind generation, building new power generation or infrastructure does carry new risk. The easiest solution is to crank up voltage, which means lower current, so old power lines don't overheat and old substation transformers, breakers can still be used- just push your existing infrastructure. Adding capacitor banks helps but they are very expensive and ultimately you still need to pipe in more power. It's only going to get worse when electric cars become popular. Most loads are inductive, this seems to be what is making the payoff. I saw industrial and plant induction motors were using less current at the higher voltages. Small loads such as light bulbs, a PC are unimportant in the big scheme. |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: james_s on December 28, 2020, 06:50:01 pm --- --- Quote from: SilverSolder on December 28, 2020, 06:13:49 pm ---Electric heat the same thing - it runs off a thermostat aiming for a setpoint, it will just take a little longer to get there (while using exactly the same amount of energy). The more you think about it, the dumber the voltage reduction idea looks. My house is still full of incandescent lamps - they are all on dimmers and last, and last, and last... and provide the warm glowing orange light I like when dimmed! They are dimmed 99% of the time and not cost effective to replace. --- End quote --- Philips makes (or at least made) a line of LED bulbs that turn more orange as they are dimmed. It's not exactly the same effect as you get with incandescent if you really dim them down low but it's pretty close. I have a handful of them that I put in the more vintage fixtures I have that are on dimmers. I still keep incandescent in all the lights at our cabin because it maintains the cool 1970s vibe the place has and since nobody is there most of the time the power bill rarely exceeds the fixed monthly charge just for being connected. I retired them everywhere else years ago though, except places that need them like the oven light and a couple of lava lamps that rely on the heat from the bulb to work. --- End quote --- I have swapped to LED in many locations, it's just that I like to dim REALLY low and make the place cozy! There are about two dozen incandescent ceiling lamps that just don't look right with LEDs. --- Quote from: Zero999 on December 28, 2020, 07:34:09 pm ---The efficiency of incandescent lamps drastically degrades when dimmed, so if you could get LED lamps with the same colour, as your dimmed incandescent lamps, you could get the same light for well under a tenth of the power. --- End quote --- During the winter months, the heat emitted by the bulbs can be subtracted from the heating bill... so it isn't so bad. During summer, the days are longer and more time is spent outside. If you do the math on it, incandescent bulbs at this geographic location are not a disaster at all. |
| james_s:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on December 29, 2020, 03:17:23 am ---I have swapped to LED in many locations, it's just that I like to dim REALLY low and make the place cozy! There are about two dozen incandescent ceiling lamps that just don't look right with LEDs. --- End quote --- It's true that nothing does quite match that cozy dimmed incandescent look, at least nothing that is readily available at modest prices. I did recently pick up a Philips Hue "White Ambiance" bulb which is pretty cool, it is dimmable from full brightness to a faint glow and the color temperature is tunable from a warm cozy 2200k up to icy blue 6500k daylight. It was fairly expensive though at $20 and has the complexity of needing a zigbee bridge, still it's cool that such a thing exists. I'm a lighting geek so I pretty much just bought it to play with, I don't plan to outfit my house with them. |
| BravoV:
Its Elon's fault, Tesla's batteries that is attached to the grid is too powerful ... :-DD ... duck&run ... |
| coppercone2:
--- Quote from: james_s on December 28, 2020, 08:42:33 am ---Is it? I thought the standard was 240V? Either way I question their claims, quoted from their site: Overvoltage increases the amount of energy used by consumers Overvoltage increases carbon emissions Overvoltage reduces the efficiency of rooftop solar Overvoltage damages domestic appliances and shortens their life Overvoltage increases the costs on everyone’s power bills Some of those may be true for incandescent lamps, but what else? Overvoltage will make electric resistance heaters produce more heat, so they'll run less time, same amount of energy is consumed. Electronics will all be made to accommodate the global standards, so at least 240V nominal, the vast majority of electronics these days are rated something like 90-265V so not an issue. Anything with a switchmode power supply which is almost everything these days, including lights will draw less current as the voltage increases, so more energy is not consumed and the bills won't be higher. IMHO this sounds like a bunch of nonsense by people who know just enough about electricity to think they know everything. --- End quote --- are you serious? it kills the life time of most devices. even a heater is running at a higher watt density and thermal cycling more often. what is that going to do to even a basic coil? Basically it causes a higher temperatre what do inrushes look like when the voltage is higher? I lived in an area next to a very spikey power grid (near a very bad load that caused frequent sags and spikes). I could make minimum wage collecting stuff and repairing stuff with fried PTCs and fuses if I wanted to. HV trashes stuff even basic light bulbs https://yarchive.net/electr/incandescent_overvoltage.html another article which I can't link here In general, if the lamp is over-driven with a voltage just five percent higher than its rating, then the life expectancy is cut in half! This effect gets worse as the voltage goes higher. At ten percent over voltage,lamp life decreases to only 31 percent of its rated value. It's great not to take action for the Sylvania Co. so they can feed on your wallet Maybe these assertions would be true if people started choking their mains inlet hard core. but then you got some hot and heavy vampires all over the place. anyone have that fat guy from blade 1 come to mind? also exploding light bulbs are not fun. |
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