Less power with lights ON !!!!!!!

Now you've done it, the halogen-lovers will seize on that as an excuse to try to force everyone to use them!

Well possibly... they may well be a small non PFC load, and probably capacitive. However you would only expect that to improve the PF of the circuit if there was some inductive lagging element to the load in the first place. What else is there on it?

It might just be an artefact of the metering system not coping with non sinusoidal current loads.

In message , Davey writes

You could argue that if you used enough of these lights, you would be saving so much electricity that you could actually be feeding power back into the grid!

Harry probably would argue that.

Colin Bignell

The 'harry effect' :-)

What would be the expensive subsidy for doing that ;-)

Four desktop PC's (Compac / HP) and a Panasonic DBS telephone exchange, a few hubs, and a pond pump

AWEM

Well the pond pump is probably an induction motor... if its big enough it may cause the effect you are seeing. Especially if the PCs are modern ones with PFC in their PSUs.

I don't have any halogen lamps. CFLs and LEDs.

I will go all LED when these LED corn cob lights come down a bit.

It IS the pond pump as was suggested by another is a previous reply - timer now turned it off at this time of night and without that inductive load the led lights now indicate an increase of 20 ish watts - stll only about half whatv you'd expect (12 x 4W = 48W)

AWEM