On Feb 17, 2005, at 11:44 AM, George Georgalis wrote:
On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 11:03:34AM -0800, Carl Lowenstein wrote:Makes the light bulb last longer, also reduces the amount of light output.
Cheaper to just buy a dim bulb, if that's what you want.
I thought the win was oscillation of electron rate vs direction, which presumably is a more efficient way to drive AC motors and other things. The light bulb insert was simply a diode (bridge?) so it did loose voltage in addition to rectifying. Presumably the power consumption of the device was nominal. All speculation.
Gack. Please.
For motors, the big win is probably startup transient. Motors pull down the largest amount of current when they start up. For old motors, a soft-startup circuit would probably gain some energy savings. Most new motors do not benefit from this (and the reports from folks seem to back this up).
The only other benefit would be reducing the amount of current drawn. On new motors, that's generally a *bad* idea. Most stuff that is EnergyStar compliant is operating pretty close to optimal efficiency.
In fact, switched DC can actually kill some motors (the RMS values for switched DC vs. sine wave are significantly different for the same power delivered). However, I would bet that if you looked at those waveforms, they are probably sine wave approximations. The system is probably an LC buck converter.
You are probably right, and I won't stop speculating. But do you think there is merit in the device?
Possibly for old motors. Aside from that, probably not.
Better to adjust the thermostat, replace light bulbs, and replace consumer electronics (non-EnergyStar VCR's, DVD's, etc can pull a remarkable amount of standby current).
-a
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