29-03-2025, 12:58 PM
(This post was last modified: 29-03-2025, 12:59 PM by Mike Watterson.)
I'm wondering how many of my lamps have failed due to excess voltage. Always been above the Irish 230V at over 235V, but recently it's mostly 245 to 250V with excursions seen as low as 241 and as high as 262. I've no 24x7 logging so don't know if it's been higher, but we have had a lot of failures of LED lamps. It's sometime since we had halogen or CFL. The few tube lamps still in use use choke ballasts, so are not likely to fail so easily as CFLs with an electronic "ballast". Might have had CFL failures due to overvoltage?
I only started regularly checking a week ago because the solar & mains charged UPS was intermittently cutting out due to "Grid overvoltage". That's more of an issue than brownouts and cuts. So I've put a big transformer with its 12V (@ 240V in) secondary in anti-phase to the UPS grid input. Since then it's been fine. We don't feed any power to the grid. Also two of the overvoltage episodes were after dark, so that rules out theory of neighbourhood solar to grid putting up the voltage.
One of the LED "GLS" spots that failed a few days before the alarms was relatively new. The electronics in it seems small, with a capacitor as the only larger part. I mean to see what failed.
I only started regularly checking a week ago because the solar & mains charged UPS was intermittently cutting out due to "Grid overvoltage". That's more of an issue than brownouts and cuts. So I've put a big transformer with its 12V (@ 240V in) secondary in anti-phase to the UPS grid input. Since then it's been fine. We don't feed any power to the grid. Also two of the overvoltage episodes were after dark, so that rules out theory of neighbourhood solar to grid putting up the voltage.
One of the LED "GLS" spots that failed a few days before the alarms was relatively new. The electronics in it seems small, with a capacitor as the only larger part. I mean to see what failed.
