> I'm just curious, since these are specs and not real life, when running > CFL from a 12 volt source, what's the real power draw? I gotta believe > they aren't as efficient at 12 V as at 110 V nor are they drawing only > the wattage shown on the spec for the light. As you imply, it is not the case that for a CFL fixture the light itself runs on the supply voltage. Rather that voltage, be it 115 V AC or 12 V DC is converted by the unit into what is needed to power the fluorescent tube. So what determines how efficient the light will be is how efficient the circuit is that does that. In general, I have found that CFLs always claim to be a bit more efficient than they really are, but the 12V models come closer to the truth than the 115V models do.
With LEDs there is a similar problem in that most of these LEDs need around 3.5-4 V DC. There is a further complication in that the current must be controlled very carefully and also with the high power LEDs temperature is critical and must be taken into account, and what's more the LED's must be protected from voltage surges or spikes much more so than with a gas tube. So I would say that the limiting factor is not so much the circuits that supply power to the lighting device itself provided that efficient designs are used (which admittedly for cheap units is often not the case), but rather the limit will be reached more due to the characteristics of the light emitting device. -Ken _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
