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Fix the voltage campaign (Australia)

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Sal Ammoniac:

--- Quote from: james_s on December 29, 2020, 05:14:08 am ---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.
--- End quote ---

I'm an amateur astronomer and I replaced all of my outdoor lights (about a dozen of them) with Phillips Hue LED bulbs. Normally, I have them set to white to light up my courtyard at night, but when I have my telescopes out, I set them all to red and dim them so they don't affect my night vision much. No more tripping on things in the dark. They work great in this application.

Sal Ammoniac:

--- Quote from: james_s on January 11, 2021, 01:36:28 am ---On the other end of the spectrum are photoflood bulbs, I have a few of those and they have a rated life of 6(!) hours but they are very bright and produce a lot of light for the power they consume, again by incandescent standards.
--- End quote ---

You forgot about flashbulbs, which have a rated life of a few milliseconds.  :-DD

tom66:

--- Quote from: tooki on January 11, 2021, 06:14:16 pm ---Precisely. That's why I think 99.99% of the claimed "planned obsolescence" actually isn't: what customer is going to buy from you again, if your product failed so quickly? (The entire premise of planned obsolescence is forcing the consumer to buy from you over and over again, but they won't if your product sucks.)
--- End quote ---

Yes, and I don't envy some consumer electronics manufacturers, faced with the dilemma of cheap-or-quality.  Make a quality produce but charge twice as much for it and no one will buy.  Make a cheap product that falls apart five years later and, well, no one will buy from you again.

You can clearly see when cost decisions have been made in product design.  The saying goes that any fool can build a bridge for a billion dollars, it takes an engineer to make it happen for a million.

This is also one reason I am very strongly in favour of products having a reparability rating and a requirement for parts and service manuals to be readily available, as it will reduce any *unplanned obsolescence* effects.

engrguy42:
This "conservation voltage reduction" thing has been around (in the US at least) for 10 or 20 years. And as far as I can tell, it hasn't saved the world.

It's one of those nice ideas that make people feel good, but in terms of implementation and evaluation it's freakin' COMPLICATED, and may not be worth it. Keep in mind that utilities are REQUIRED to make sure the voltage at their customers is within state limits. ALL customers. Which means if you go around lowering your normal voltage on the feeders you now need to re-engineer the equipment you have installed to make sure that the worst case voltage on all the circuits doesn't fall below the mandated lower limits, especially for the guy at the very end of the circuit where normal voltage hangs around the lower limit in the best of cases.

They have transformers with tap changers to regulate voltage, as well as separate voltage regulators, as well as automatically and manually switched capacitors to manage voltage at all points on the circuits. And those voltage profiles vary by time of day and what kind of load is running and location on the circuit. FREAKIN' COMPLICATED !!! Which means you now have to spend lots of money to re-engineer and re-evaluate the circuit design and modify/add installed regulation and monitoring equipment. Big bucks.

Oh, and by the way, who pays those big bucks??

And depending on the type of load (industrial, residential, commercial, etc.), the benefits of the lower voltage could be either negligible or tiny, and not worth the investment. And unless you install a bunch of fancy monitoring equipment you'll never know exactly the the benefit was, if any.

Anyway, it seems like a strange time to be trying to convince the world that a tiny bit of perceived energy efficiency is what's really going to save the world.    :palm:

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: tom66 on January 11, 2021, 05:15:37 pm ---There have been a few cases of planned obsolescence over the years.  However, I think the key issue is that people don't generally re-purchase products from suppliers who produce unreliable goods.  Quality is seen as one of the more important factors that consumers consider when purchasing a product, and while price is also a critical factor, that creates a balancing act for manufacturers.

For instance, while I am sure car manufacturers have considered making unreliable cars to sell more cars,  they ultimately spend an enormous amount of money making their vehicles last for a long period of time,  because it is bad customer image if their product only lasts 7 years.

--- End quote ---

Manufacturers have a perfect "out", especially with household items-------- they simply reduce the quality of the "prestige" brands, so that they are just as bad as the "El Cheapo" option.

The  mugs, sorry, "valued customers", sick of the short life of the latter, then pay a premium for a "Sunbeam", "Philips", etc, which doesn't last any longer, costs the importer the same amount, but retails for three times as much!
Now that all the "grand old names" have been whored off, that isn't hard.

Customers eventually accept that they might as well buy the "El Cheapo".
They are still paying more, overall, as they have to replace each device much more frequently, but are no longer getting suckered in by the "premium" brands.

Interestingly, there are still a few well engineered "El Cheapos" around, which have quite respectable lifetimes.
Finding them is the hard part!

I got suckered when I bought a "Wertheim" vacuum cleaner, a so-called "top of the line" model which was purported to be "German designed".(After all, it had a nice "pretend" German name,)

All I can say is the designers had never seen the inside of an Engineering classroom.
More likely drawn on the back of a placemat at the local boozer!

Needless to say, it was bloody useless, never operating for more than10 minutes before overheating, the hose continually blocking because the dumbos ran the wiring for the "power head" loose though it.
(Our little 15 year old Toshiba had wires running in the hose, too, but they were embedded in the wall.)

The Wertheim was chucked into the shed, & the poor, old, long suffering Toshiba put back into service.
After a few attempts to fix the POS, it went to the verge rubbish pickup.

After some years, the venerable Toshiba finally failed, & was replaced by a $A50 "Ozito"canister vacuum cleaner, which has worked admirably for several years.



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