Drop the Hammer

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We want to take a more in depth look at cfls from the electronic side. Today we have cfls with good electronic ballasts and a smaller size lamp overall. There are many unhappy people who are scared to try cfls again after so many issues when they came out in the past.

In 1975 the cfls developed were improved to not have the flicker effect. One of the main problems with these lamps still was the thermal condition. Since the heat had formally been able to spread throughout the tube shape and was now compacted to fit in cfls, problems arose leading to reliability issues. How then could they still be considered less hot than incandescent light bulbs?

The heat issue did not involve the bulbs being hot to touch, the problem of heat was in the components of the electronic ballast causing the components to fail. When it came to heat the safety was not harmful to humans, but to the internal components in the ballast with the higher temperature. Reliability is a function of components and the ballasts had hundreds of components, making them less reliable. The challenge was to make ballasts and lamps work for all different fixtures and circumstances.

Another question has arose when it comes to certain cfls that come in an orientation pattern – base up vs. base down ballast. This has to do with the mercury vapor pressure being different in the way the heat travels to light the lamp. Today this issue has been solved by using amalgams, which control the mercury vapor pressure, making the difference in ballasts insignificant.

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Ed pointed out that one of the huge, almost unrecognized advantages of high frequency ballasts was that they produced flicker-free light! There had been health effects, such as headaches, eye strain etc, with using magnetic ballasts. The use of high frequency ballasts cuts down on these issues as they create a constant continuous light stream.

The new high frequency ballasts also led to a lower loss in the cores and no longer needed transformers that became extremely hot. They could use smaller cooler inductors for the ballasts. Using the new ballasts it was possible to decrease the total number of ballasts by 50% and double the number of lamps (compared to magnetic ballasts).

From about 1975-1980 the new high frequency ballasts were still failing. They needed to make them as reliable as the magnetic ballasts that were used in order to make progress to begin switching them. In about 1980 the high frequency ballasts had equal reliability to the best electromagnetic ballasts.

Rebates from utilities helped cfl sales using the new ballasts to grow at this time. However, there was a curious problem at that time that people were encountering. In some of the rebate areas, people would have issues with their televisions cycling channels – the remote control seemed to be not working properly. They would take them to be repaired, pay high repair costs, get their tv home and still have the same issue! It turned out that the frequency from these initial high frequency ballasts was the same as the frequency from the televisions – causing interference when cfls and televisions were simultaneously used.

This created the need to keep the ballasts out of same frequency as tv remote controls. The problem was eventually solved when they got together with the television companies and figured which frequencies were being used. Another example was at the grocery store, there would be a high frequency bulb used above the register, causing the scanner to ring up the incorrect prices. Eventually these issues led to frequency standards being set up within the industries, so that different products would not interfere such as these instances.

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According to Ed, a lot of work was done by GE in 1970′s, specifically by a man named John Anderson. He patented an electronic high frequency ballast which was technically successful, but not commercially successful because of very high costs. Therefore the technology was there at the time, but the cost made no sense to make them.

In 1973-74 the oil crisis took place and lamp companies needed to reduce wattage in their linear (tube) lamps to compensate. Many people had four bulb fixtures and were removing two bulbs, to save energy, therefore dropping sales by half. This forced lamp companies to create energy efficient solution.

Ed worked on creating lamp with reduced wattage by adding krypton and a conductive tin coating inside. This helped lower the wattage from 40 to 35 watts but he wanted to get down to 30 watts. He continued to work and finally the wattage went from 35 to 34 and eventually 32 watts!

Ed explains the different types of linear lamps – T8, T12, T5, T17. The conversion is 1 inch = 8/8 diameter. Therefore a T12 = 12/8 =1.5 inches in diameter, or a T8 = 8/8 = 1 inch in diameter.

The new lamps created a reliable start and higher range of ambiant light, using less energy.

In 1975 companies were still using old electronic ballasts which were failing, while the lamps were still good. This posed a problem for extending the life of the whole package. It was pointed out that the ballast and lamp have to be a system – the ballasts needed to catch up with technology the lamps had already reached.

Ed realized they would need a CFL for residential use. He came up with the idea to make the linear tube into a spiral. He was told that it would be too expensive and the reflection loss would be too great, basically that he should NOT waste his time.

He went ahead and made the spiral, and as long as he optimized the spacing between the spirals the reflection loss was minimized (at the most 3 lumens per watt). This still made the CFL lamps much better than the incandescent bulbs.

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