Needs 416 Amps at 120 Volts
My electric cost is 13.7 cents per KWH, if I calculated this right, it will cost $68.50 to run this bulb for one hour.
You slipped a decimal point. It's $6.85 per hour but that is still a lot of money if multiplied by 12 hours per day and 30 days per month! The article was interesting, but the writer made a few strange assumptions. The most obvious is his statement that lamps like these are need for "airport lighting". Huh? If he had seen an airport from high altitude, he would have noticed they look dark compared to the surrounding area. Unless you are close to being lined up with a runway at a fairly low altitude, you can't even see the runway lights.
We had pilot controlled runway lights at Vung Tau (remeber that) in
1964. They did not always work :-?
as Las Vegas gets it's electricity and water from Hoover Dam, can anyone give an estimate of how much water it takes to generate the electricity required for these lamps?
That's insane!!! 7000 watts x 39 bulbs is 273,000 watts. And I thought
50,000 watts was crazy! This would require around 2300 amps (at 120 volts), but I bet they use a higher voltage.I have no idea how to determine the amount of water it takes to generate the electricity required for these lamps? How can that be figured???
How much water flows through the dam damn per hour? How much electricity is generated by the dam damn per hour?
And if no electricity was generated the same flow would be passing the dam. They do control the flow to a point, but overall, the river and nature control the overall flow per year.
To reverse this information, I was trying to estimate how many average homes could be powered by 273,000 watts. Of course that would only be an average, since every home is different, but looking it from the point of AMPS, (2300 amps @ 120v). I'd guess that few homes are using over
50amps (at 120V) at once. Add in the 240 volt appliances, and 'Normal' home exceeds 100 amps, (since many homes have 100A service). So if each home averages no more than 50 amps at once, you could power at least 46 homes. (but probably more like 70)...... (just a guess.....).I've always wondered how much energy one turbine at a power source can produce? But that's where things get real complicated, because they produce much higer voltages, which are stepped down using transformers, and there is line loss to consider. And it's produced in THREE PHASE, Plus I'm sure there are bigger and smaller turbines in use. So I doubt no one other than someone working at the source really could answer that!
Bingo.
Funny, I didn't read the whole thing, but the only two examples I saw where they showed it being used was at lighting demonstration shows. Even where you need a lot of lighting, I can't imagine an application where you'd want it in one bulb, as opposed to many bulbs spread out to light a larger area. I bet they didn't sell many.
OOPS, I did slip the decimal point!!!!
But 12 hours is $82.20, and 30 days would be $2466.00 per month. NO THANKS!
50 kW AM radio stations have electric bills like that, too - only 24 hrs/day (and even more because transmitters aren't 100% efficient). I specified AM because FM stations and TV stations up their power using high gain antennas. A 50 kW FM station might have a 1 kW transmitter feeding an antenna that has a gain of 50, but a "clear channel" (as they used to called before a company started using that name) AM station really has a 50 kW transmitter along with the $5,000 per month electric bill just for the transmitter.
You're a cheap SOB. Think of the security for your wife and kids coming home at night You NEED a decent light for them. Put another on the other side of the house too.
I thought the FCC had eliminated all the "clear channel" high powered AM stations. Years ago I used to be able to get them on long drives across the country but I have not heard any in a long time.
It would peel the paint right off.
The article was written in 1932. Airport lighting was much different then.
Of course even modern airports have lighting other than the runway lights (tarmac lighting, terminal lighting, beacon lighting) that require high intensity bulbs.
Not 50,000 Watt bulbs! I doubt any one bulb is more than 400 Watts.
I was hoping that there was somebody in the field that could answer the question
As usual, Google works.
Hoover dam has 17 turbines producing max 2 gigawatts.
Or for a nuke:
You can get a single turbine/generator that produces .9 to 1.9 GWatts.
I agree having multiple sources much smaller than 50KW is the approach used. I doubt that 50KW bulb was actually used for anything, even in 1932. The only examples I saw given were at lighting demonstration shows. IDK what kind of beacon lighting he's talking about either. I've been to a lot of airports around the world and have never seen such a light, which would be impossible to miss.
Since beacon lighting was brought up, lighthouses come to mind. They are the classic example of a beacon. I just checked what Sandy Hook, at NY harbor uses. It's 1000W with a lens and can be seen for 19 miles.
On Sunday, February 22, 2015 at 5:03:04 PM UTC-5, Pat wrote: A 50 kW FM station might have a 1 kW transmitter
At least in the past, a 50 kW AM station during the day was required to turn it down to 5 kW at night. That should reduce the electric bill a bit.
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