Yes. I had loads of them in the old house, and long with 30W strip filament tubes, they were the fastest blowers.
The 40W candles have now replaced them as the 'big stock' items.
60W bayonet and screws seem to be average, the LV spots seem to be outstanding.
Nah, Buy em 50 at a time. :-)
>
Still got the seal betwixt wires and glass though. How ever I don't think that failure of the seal is the problem, just simple overheating.
I think the term is "SES" - "Small Edison Screw" as per the inventor Edison.
One idea out there is a "zero cross switch" device which waits until the mains is near the zero volt axis before switching on. This ensures that the bulb is not shocked when the lightswitch is used and the mains happens to be at its maximum voltage.
Contact me for further details and I'll dig out the small article in an electronics magazine I have festering in my loft. You'll have to be savvy with simple electronics of course or find someone to build the circuit for you. Otherwise there are zero cross triac opto-isolators that could probably do the same job.
HTH
Mungo
Can't live without the dimmer I'm afraid! Got one in every room except the bathroom. Essential items, especially if you have other lighting in the room like lamps.
Thanks for the suggestion though!
F./
True, but the rate of failure is at least double all of the others in the flat.
norm suggested that as well. I'm not too sure in this case, having just taken a look. The glass part of the bulbs are entirely open to air, with only the screw having a plastic surround, and this isn't especially tight either. There is a 2mm thick piece of donut-shaped decorative plastic that sits around the bulb at it's widest point like a halo, but I make sure that it's never touching the bulb. The support legs for it are also quite thin.
Plenty of ventilation. Would ambient room temperature be a factor? The combi boiler is in the kitchen and the thermostat isn't...usually nice and toasty in there.
Yeah, I run them dimmed mostly at night....mostly. Except for just now where only two of them are working!!
No shaking (or noise) from above either, big old sturdy building with elderly people above me.
I'm starting to get the opinion these bulbs just suck!
Mailing bulbs through the post? ;-) Interesting...will look into the prices tomorrow!
Does anyone have any preferences for bulb manufacturer? Do some last longer etc?
F./
Ah, cheers!
Gotcha. I'm pretty electronic savvy, so I know exactly what you are getting at. Never heard of it before, and I couldn't find any google links for it in relation to lighting.
I was hoping that the dimmer would do the same thing...I've never cracked one open, but I assume they work in series, so by getting a dimmer that only goes up and down (no on/off toggle), the voltage should be ramped up more gradually. Anecdotally, it may have improved it slightly but I wasn't taking notes, so I can't really say for sure.
Is it a replacement for the switch, or an in-line thing? I quite like my dimmers, and don't really want to lose them! Would save you digging around the nether regions of "the messy place"... ;-)
F./
Kitchen lights tend to be used more.
Maybe they are on twice as long? I fitted a PIR to the kitchen light in my old flat 'cause I was for ever leaving it on (3 x 60W spots).
I recognise the style. Shouldn't think heat is the problem, how hot does the plastic shroud to the base get after a few hours?
The other thing is vibration. You might not hear the the noise, you need to watch the intensity/position of the light patches to see if there is any shake there. A tiny movement in the filament shows quite dramtically in the light patch.
No, most towns have at least one wholesaler, might have a "Trade Only" notice but business is business buy a reasonable quantity with cash and I doubt they'll refuse you.
Not that I have noticed. I have a sneaky feeling that GEC and Osram all come out of the Ring factory in Leeds. I don't have a particulary high opinion of Ring...
I thought Ring was made in czechoslovakia or summat.
They are the WORST bulbs I have EVER bought, bar NONE.
Some didn't even work on initial plug in.
>
That's just a depot, (it's about a mile away from here) there is a "Factory" shop on site there.
Osram is the 2nd biggest manufacturer of lamps in the world based in Germany, their lamps were sold here under the Wotan brand. Oddly at the same time G.E.C. was making lamps and selling them under the Osram brand, probably all due to reparations after WW1. Recently G.E.C. lamps merged with Osram.
It's just an importer of cheap bulbs sourced from anywhere at all. Some 40w golf ball bulbs I bought there recently lasted less than 1 week! If anybody has any suggestions for a long life substitute for these I'd be very greatful, my ceiling fans take 2 of them (ES fitting) and candle lamps won't fit (too long).
DG
Osram had a factory in Hammersmith but during WW1 this was taken over by GEC. Previously all their R&D work had been done in Germany. Clifford Patterson, who was at the time church secretary at my church and a lighting expert at the nearby NPL in Teddington was head-hunted to set up an R&D facility for GEC which he did, initially in Hammersmith, moving to purpose built labs in Wembley in the early 1920's. This work developed into research into valves, radio and radar, also the first fluorescent lamps. See the last few paras of
Osram was part of GEC (called GEC Osram) when I started working for GEC in 1983, and the lamps were available through the staff discount scheme. A few years later, GEC sold Osram (to Siemens at the time I thought, but certainly a German company).
I've got a couple of Ring 500W halogen lamps, which completely silvered over after a few hours use (not on a dimmer). I think they forgot to put any gas in the quartz tube.
A-hah! I was wondering just recently where you got your profound knowledge of fluorescent tubes from.
GEC Lighting, but seemingly not Osram, was sold to Siemens. Bit about it here :
It's a crying shame we've abandoned a great world leading industry because people just want stuff cheap, and now this is what we get.
DG
Actually, nothing to do with that. I worked for GEC Computers back then.
I have always been interested in lighting, and made various discharge lamps and control gear for standard discharge lamps when I was at school. Don Klipstein seems to have saved something I wrote about making my own fluorescent dimming ballasts here:
Another excellent UK company in this area was Thorn Lighting. They got taken over by EMI, probably sometime in the 1980's, and my perception was they lost their edge. Finally, there was a management buyout, but to finance this, they had to sell the lamp manufacturing to GE in the US (nothing to do with GEC in the UK), and Thorn Lighting only retained the luminare/lantern part of the former company. In addition to the lamps themselves, they had previously manufactured control gear too -- I don't know what happened to that part of the business.
Mazda (god of light) was one of the Thorn lighting lamp brands, now used by GE. (Actually, I think GE always had rights to the Mazda name in the US, even before it bought that part of Thorn Lighting.)
So am I :-)
But surely the whole point of a dimmer is to dim the rms seen by the light / filament. The ONLY way to regulate the RMS (using TRIACS whitch is the standard today, easy cheap...) is to delay the time after cross over before you fire the triac because when you have fired the triac there is no way to turn the thing off before the voltage accros it gets very near zero where it turns it self off again. You then need to fire it again somewhere on the rising slope (or the falling slope) depending of what rms you want your load to see...
Zero cross over detection is very usefull when using a triac as a on / off switch because if you fire the triac just after the cross over thereis very little harmonic distortion because the voltage seen by the load is rising to fast. If you time it fast enough you can doo with very little filtration if any at all because there will be no noise at all. If i remember correctly you need approximately 8 - 10V accros the triac to turn on and stay on, so you usually fire at cross over and keep the trigger on until the triac can lock...
To short time and the triac won't lock, to long time and you're wasting energy driving the triac when it isn't necessary...
The rise time of modern triacs are very fast and creates quite alot of noise when triggered somewhere between cros overs so needs quite a lot of filtration...
If you wan't true sinewave seen by the load and be able to dim it you need to use a mosfet push - pull stage and then drive it acordingly to your load, but this gets very complicated and looses quite alot of energi in the driver / mosfets but it is dooable...
Did this make sense???
/Morten
All true for a *warm* filament which is at high resistance. Try shocking a cold filament which has low resistance and see how the coils react...
The gadget I described was not intended for use with a dimmer.
I suppose we could devise circuitry to ensure that the filament was "warmed" by letting the first dozen or so mains cycles through to it and then do the "dimmer" effect after this 0.25 second.
Mungo
So you are basically doing the same as digital pulse code modulation in the AC realm? That's sick! :-)
Mostly, yes. Brought back a lot of suppressed lectures of stuff I've never used since then!
It all seems a little complicated though, especially for a problem with kitchen lights. More suited for a nuclear power plant or something else needing a lot of control!
Cheers for the idea though!
F.
sworn and deadly enemy to Lucas, Prince of Darkness ;-)
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