General > General Technical Chat
LED LIGHTS. Any good flicker free ones?
james_s:
--- Quote from: themadhippy on January 22, 2023, 02:14:51 am ---
--- Quote ---It would be trivial for a retrofit tube to have the pins on each end shorted together and take power from both ends of the tube
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covered in the video, but ,for those with short attention span -safety ,you get one end in and your trying to get the other end in and touch the pins,you aint turned the switch off so and your in series with the led and earth.
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Who does that? Are the sockets different there? Here you slide the tube in both ends at the same time and then twist it and the pins engage with the contacts. You're always supposed to turn off the switch when relamping but in practice it's rarely an issue. Whatever the case the LED retrofit tubes I have in my kitchen are exactly this way, power is fed from each end of the tube and it requires no modification to the fixture at all, it uses the original electronic ballast to regulate the current and you can even use a mix of fluorescent and LED tubes if you wanted to. It never occurred to me that some would be different.
james_s:
--- Quote from: IanB on January 22, 2023, 02:15:40 am ---If you took power from both ends of the tube in a traditional fitting with magnetic ballast, wouldn't that put the LED strip in series with the ballast? That might work if the LED strip was designed with that in mind, but then it might not work with electronic ballasts that have instant start. I imagine the designers have to cater for users who are not familiar with such details, and have to make things that uninformed users cannot screw up?
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Yes but so what? A choke coil in series with an LED lamp that draws less power than the original tube will result in only a modest voltage drop, the lamp could easily be designed to account for that without sacrificing its ability to operate direct from the line without a choke. If a retrofit tube requires modifying the fixture in any way then you might as well remove the ballast entirely and feed power directly to the tube sockets.
Actually those tubes that get power from one end only and have the ballast bypassed present a significant flaw, if somebody ever installs a standard fluorescent tube in the fixture you're going to have the full 240V mains across the cathode and that's going to go bang. Typically they operate at only a few volts, limited in preheat fixtures by the current that the ballast choke can pass.
IanB:
--- Quote from: james_s on January 22, 2023, 03:59:22 am ---Yes but so what? A choke coil in series with an LED lamp that draws less power than the original tube will result in only a modest voltage drop, the lamp could easily be designed to account for that without sacrificing its ability to operate direct from the line without a choke. If a retrofit tube requires modifying the fixture in any way then you might as well remove the ballast entirely and feed power directly to the tube sockets.
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Got that, but I think electronic ballasts might work like a switching power supply at a much higher frequency than normal, and then the LED lamp would have be be able to operate with that? (I don't know for sure, but at a guess the kind of electronic ballast I have might be a high frequency AC constant current supply with a very high compliance voltage. This would explain the instant on, no warm up behavior of the tubes. It would treat the lamp as a gas discharge tube like a neon tube. If this were the case, the LED replacement would be subjected to the same constant current that the ballast demanded.)
wraper:
--- Quote from: bigfoot22 on January 22, 2023, 07:00:31 am ---Did you know that Fluorescent light tubes are highly recyclable? So we are actually causing more environmental harm by buying LED lights in droves than we are sticking with Fluorescent.... If you ignore the mercury.
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LED bulbs are 2-4 times more efficient. During it's lifetime energy consumption difference is much more than any additional recycled materials could possibly be worth it. Not to say other than glass from the tube, I don't see any difference between them in regards of materials to be recycled. Recycling is a complete bullshit for the most part. The vast majority of materials still go to the landfill and resulting materials are usually lower quality, often more expensive than raw materials, and considering resources spent on recycling not that green to begin with. It makes a lot of sense to recycle metals but oher than that it's more like whitewashing and what makes you feel good about yourself.
Psi:
--- Quote from: bigfoot22 on January 22, 2023, 07:00:31 am ---Did you know that Fluorescent light tubes are highly recyclable? So we are actually causing more environmental harm by buying LED lights in droves than we are sticking with Fluorescent.... If you ignore the mercury.
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The problem with currently available LED bulbs is they always run way too hot due to being very compact.
The driver overheats, capacitors fail and the LED die ages super fast.
You could say it's just a cost savings measure or planned obsolescence.
But in any case, a LED bulb that should last well over 15 years lasts 2 years, maybe 5 years for a really good brand.
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